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Guide · Counting semantics · 2026

The counting rules that catch people out — rolling windows outside Schengen, caps on top of your allowance, and clocks you share with the country next door

The visa rules people get wrong are the ones whose clock is not the clock in front of you. A rolling window where nobody expects one, a window that is not 90 days in 180, an annual cap sitting on top of the per-visit allowance, and a regional clock shared with three neighbours. Stretch publishes 1,160 passport-to-destination routes carrying a day count, 322 of them rolling, across 30 destinations of which 13 sit outside the Schengen area. Two of those four shapes our arithmetic implements. Two it does not, and this page says which.

By David Toniolo, Do a Stretch · Updated 2026-08-23 · Prices and facts checked 2026-08-23 · 11 min read

The short answer

The rules that produce overstays are rarely the complicated ones. They are the ones where the clock you are actually on is not the clock in front of you. Four shapes do most of the damage:

  1. A rolling window somewhere you did not expect one. Most travellers meet the rolling window at Schengen and file it as a European peculiarity. In our published rulebook, 30 destinations govern at least one route with a rolling window and 13 of them are outside the Schengen area entirely.
  2. A window that is not 90 days in 180. Across the 322 rolling-window routes we publish, the shapes are 90 in 180 (273 routes), 90 in 365 (26 routes), 180 in 365 (23 routes). Reading a 180-in-365 rule as though it were the Schengen shape gets both numbers wrong.
  3. A cap sitting on top of the per-visit allowance. Nepal grants up to 90 days on a tourist visa on arrival, and separately caps total tourist stay at 150 days per visa year. Two legal entries can add up to an illegal year.
  4. A clock shared with the country next door. Guatemala's 90 days is a CA-4 clock shared with El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua. Crossing between those four borders does not restart it.

And the part a page like this has no business hiding: our arithmetic implements the first two shapes and not the second two. A cap stacked on a per-visit allowance and a shared regional clock are not in the count at all, so on those two our answer is looser than the law — the direction that produces an overstay. Separately, where a source caps stay per calendar year we currently store a rolling 365-day window instead, which is stricter than the law. The section below names all three gaps and which direction each one fails in.

A rolling window where you did not expect one

Of the 1,555 passport-to-destination routes Stretch publishes, 1,160 carry a day count. Of the rest, 167 are free-movement rights, which have no clock, and 228 carry no day number for another reason — a visa sets the length, or nothing we trust records one. Of the 1,160 that do carry a count, 838 are per-entry and 322 are rolling. Per-entry is the common case, which is exactly why the rolling ones surprise people.

The 13 rolling-window destinations outside the Schengen area are Albania, Barbados, Brazil, Cyprus, Ecuador, India, Kiribati, Montenegro, Peru, Serbia, South Korea, Türkiye, the United Arab Emirates. Some are European and some are nowhere near Europe, which is the point: the shape does not follow the map. A traveller who has internalised "Schengen is rolling, everywhere else resets when I leave" gets every one of those wrong, and gets them wrong in the direction that produces an overstay rather than a wasted flight. The mechanics of why leaving does not help are in per-entry versus rolling window.

The window is not always 180 days long

"Rolling" names the shape, not the numbers. Both numbers vary:

Window How it reads Routes
90/180 90 days in any rolling 180 273
90/365 90 days in any rolling 365 26
180/365 180 days in any rolling 365 23

A 180-in-365 rule is twice the allowance over twice the window. It is not a generous version of 90/180; it behaves differently, because days age out over a year rather than over six months, so a stay you took last autumn is still in the count next summer. It is also why the longest published allowances do not rank the way their headline numbers suggest: a long window is not a long stay. Check the specific route rather than the number you remember — every route page in the Stretch rulebook states the shape it counts on, with the source it came from and the date we checked it.

A cap sitting on top of the per-visit allowance

This is the shape that defeats mental arithmetic, because nothing at the border tells you about it. Nepal is the clearest published case. The Department of Immigration grants a tourist visa on arrival of 15, 30 or 90 days, so 90 is the longest single stay you can get at the airport. Separately, total tourist stay is capped at 150 days per visa year, which runs January to December and is therefore the calendar year (immigration.gov.np, read 22 August 2026; re-read before relying on this).

Both rules are real and they do not interact the way people assume. Nothing stops you being granted a second 90-day visa on arrival in the same year. You will simply be over the annual cap while holding a valid visa, which is a considerably worse place to be than being refused at the desk. The cap is a fact about your year rather than about the visa in your passport, and it is not in the number our arithmetic counts — read it off the Department of Immigration page linked below, not off a day counter.

A clock you share with the country next door

Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua operate the CA-4 agreement: one 90-day allowance covering all four, which does not restart when you cross between them. A traveller who spends a month in each is not on four fresh clocks, they are on one, and it runs out in the fourth country while every individual stay still looks short.

The border-run instinct is exactly wrong here in a way that has nothing to do with rolling windows. Leaving Guatemala genuinely does end your presence in Guatemala. It just does not end your presence on the CA-4 clock, because the clock was never Guatemalan. Guatemala's stay is extendable once by the same period on application (Reglamento de Visas Guatemaltecas art. 13, read 22 August 2026), which is the sanctioned route out of the problem — the neighbouring border is not.

What our own arithmetic does not do yet

Three gaps, and they fail in different directions. Which direction matters more than the gap.

Calendar-year caps stored as a rolling 365-day window — stricter than the rule. Our rule model has no calendar-period shape, so a source that caps stay per calendar year is currently represented as a rolling 365. India's tourist arrangement is the case you are most likely to meet: the official wording is that maximum stay "during one Calender Year should not exceed 180 days" (indianvisaonline.gov.in, read 22 August 2026), and we track it as 180 days in a rolling 365. Across a year boundary a rolling 365 is the stricter reading, so it may warn you earlier than the law requires. Every affected rule says so in its own note on its route page. Modelling a calendar period exactly is on our backlog and is not built yet, so until it is, read a 180-in-365 on an Indian route as a deliberately cautious stand-in for the published rule rather than as the published rule itself.

An annual cap on top of a per-visit allowance — looser than the rule. Nepal's 150-day visa-year total is modelled nowhere. The per-visit 90 is the whole of what the arithmetic counts, so a traveller who takes two 90-day stays in one calendar year passes our check and fails Nepal's.

A regional shared clock — looser than the rule. Same story for CA-4: the rule model has no shared regional clock, so the Guatemala rule counts Guatemala alone. A traveller circling El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua passes our arithmetic and fails Guatemala's.

The first gap is conservative and will only ever cost you days you were entitled to. The second and third are not, and on those two destinations the official source is the whole of the protection — read it, and do the annual arithmetic yourself. We would rather publish that sentence than publish a number that looks as though it has been checked.

Worked example

A traveller with a British passport plans two Nepal trips in 2026.

They arrive in Kathmandu on 10 January and take a 90-day visa on arrival, leaving on 9 April. Counting the arrival and departure dates, which both count as days of presence, that is exactly 90 days — the full allowance, legally used.

They come back on 1 June, take another 90-day visa on arrival, and leave on 29 August. That is another 90 days, also inside the per-visit maximum, also granted at the border without an argument.

Every individual step is legal. The year is not. Nepal's total tourist stay for the visa year is 150 days, and the first trip used 90 of them, so 60 remain when the traveller lands on 1 June. Sixty days from 1 June runs out on 30 July. From 31 July they are over the annual cap while holding a valid visa — a considerably worse position than being turned away at the desk — and they stay a further 30 days past it.

Stretch does not catch this today. Both stays are inside the per-entry maximum, so both count clean. The annual cap is not in the arithmetic at all, which is why this page states it in words and links the Department of Immigration page rather than leaving you to infer it from a day counter. Run the same trip in two different calendar years — say the second stay starting in January rather than June — and there is no problem at all, because the cap resets on the calendar and not on your exit.

The CA-4 version of the same trap is spatial rather than temporal. Thirty days in Guatemala, thirty in Honduras and thirty in Nicaragua is not three fresh allowances; it is the whole of one, and El Salvador is where you would find that out.

Where this does not apply

  • Free movement has no clock at all. An EU/EEA or Swiss passport inside that area, or an Irish or British passport under the Common Travel Area, is exercising a right of residence rather than spending a visitor allowance. Our rulebook models those separately and shows no day number, because inventing one would be wrong. Which passports that covers, and how much of each one's set it accounts for, is its own table.
  • A residence permit or long-stay visa changes the question. Everything above describes short-stay visitor allowances. If you hold a permit, its own conditions govern and none of these caps are the binding constraint.
  • Extensions change the per-visit number, not the cap. Extending a Guatemalan stay by the same period is a sanctioned application; it does not create a second CA-4 clock. Nepal's annual total likewise sits above whatever single visa you are holding.
  • These rules move, and government pages move faster than we re-read them. Every source below carries the date we read it. Re-read it before relying on it, especially if your trip is months out.
  • We do not claim more than we have checked. Published is not the same as verified: each route page carries its own evidence tier and checked date, and the weaker ones are labelled as such rather than quietly averaged in with the rest.
  • The officer at the desk decides. All of this describes how the rules are written, not what happens on a bad morning at a border.

Frequently asked questions

Can I be over a limit while holding a valid visa?

Yes, and that is the whole danger of a stacked cap. A visa on arrival grants a single stay; an annual cap governs the sum of your stays. Nepal will issue the second visa and the second visa will not protect you once the year's total is past 150 days.

Does leaving Guatemala for Honduras restart the 90 days?

No. The CA-4 allowance covers Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua as one area, and crossing an internal border does not restart it. Leaving the CA-4 area entirely is a different question, and not one we model either — read the manual linked below rather than trusting the border-run instinct.

Is a calendar-year cap the same as a rolling 365-day window?

No, and the difference is largest at the turn of the year. A calendar-year cap empties on 1 January regardless of when you travelled; a rolling 365 only ever drops days one at a time, 365 days after you spent them. A rolling 365 is therefore the stricter of the two across a year boundary — which is the direction our current approximation errs in, and we say so on the affected route pages.

Does Stretch model every one of these rules exactly?

No. Rolling windows and per-entry allowances, yes — those are the two shapes the arithmetic implements. Exact calendar-period limits are not implemented, so calendar-year caps are approximated as rolling 365 windows; annual caps stacked on a per-visit allowance and regional shared clocks are not modelled at all, and the official source is the only place either constraint is stated in full. The section above says which destinations that affects and which direction each approximation fails in.

Which shape is hardest to track by hand?

The stacked cap, because it needs two counts at once and only one of them is ever mentioned to you. A rolling window is hard arithmetic but at least it is a single question; a 150-day annual total on top of a 90-day per-visit allowance is two questions, and passing the one at the desk tells you nothing about the other.

Sources

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