STRETCH Get the app

Guide · Counting semantics · 2026

Where you can stay visa-free the longest — and why a long allowance and a resettable allowance are not the same thing

The longest visa-free stay Stretch publishes is 365 days, reached at Albania, Georgia. But the headline number is the least useful thing about a destination. A long allowance you cannot restart is worth less than a shorter one you can, and across the 72 destinations where we publish a day count the figure usually depends on which passport you hold — so the maximum is one route, not the country.

By David Toniolo, Do a Stretch · Updated 2026-08-23 · Prices and facts checked 2026-08-23 · 16 min read

The short answer

The longest visa-free stay in the Stretch rulebook is 365 days. It is reached at Albania, Georgia. Below those sits a broad band of well-known destinations, in the order the table gives them. The complete ranking — every one of the 72 destinations where we publish a day count at all — is in the table below.

That is the answer to the question as asked. It is also the least useful sentence on this page, because a ranking by maximum hides the two things that actually decide how long you get to stay.

First: a long allowance and a resettable allowance are different things. Georgia's year restarts every time you arrive. Albania's, wherever a rolling window governs the route, does not — it is a budget spent across a moving window, and leaving the country does not refill it. Nor is the headline offered on the same terms: the 365-day maximum is reached by Albania on 1 of its 22 routes, Georgia on 20 of its 21 routes. Same figure, opposite behaviour, and reached by opposite fractions of the routes behind it. Which one you are under matters more than the number itself.

Second: a destination does not have "a" number. It has one per passport, and what your own passport actually gets is a different table from this one. The third column of the table below shows the range across the routes we publish, and for most of these destinations that range is wide. A page that tells you "Georgia gives you a year" is telling most of its readers something it has not checked. The number that applies to you is the one on your own route, not the best one the country offers anybody.

The longest published stays, in full

Destination Longest published stay Across our routes Routes At that length
Albania 365 days 90–365 days, depending on passport 22 1
Georgia 365 days 30–365 days, depending on passport 21 20
Peru 183 days 90–183 days, depending on passport 19 1
Antigua & Barbuda 180 days every route agrees 15 15
Barbados 180 days 28–180 days, depending on passport 16 9
Canada 180 days every route agrees 16 16
Costa Rica 180 days 30–180 days, depending on passport 21 20
Dominica 180 days 21–180 days, depending on passport 17 14
Ecuador 180 days 90–180 days, depending on passport 19 1
Hong Kong 180 days 14–180 days, depending on passport 22 1
India 180 days every route agrees 21 21
Jamaica 180 days 30–180 days, depending on passport 19 6
Mexico 180 days every route agrees 17 17
New Zealand 180 days 90–180 days, depending on passport 17 1
Panama 180 days 90–180 days, depending on passport 20 2
South Korea 180 days 30–180 days, depending on passport 19 1
the United Kingdom 180 days every route agrees 17 17
the United States 180 days 90–180 days, depending on passport 16 1
Mauritius 120 days 60–120 days, depending on passport 2 1
Argentina 90 days every route agrees 20 20
Australia 90 days every route agrees 15 15
Austria 90 days every route agrees 10 10
Brazil 90 days 30–90 days, depending on passport 20 19
Brunei 90 days 14–90 days, depending on passport 18 12
Bulgaria 90 days every route agrees 10 10
Chile 90 days 30–90 days, depending on passport 20 19
Colombia 90 days every route agrees 20 20
Croatia 90 days every route agrees 10 10
Cyprus 90 days every route agrees 10 10
Czechia 90 days every route agrees 10 10
Estonia 90 days every route agrees 10 10
France 90 days every route agrees 10 10
Germany 90 days every route agrees 10 10
Greece 90 days every route agrees 10 10
Guatemala 90 days every route agrees 20 20
Hungary 90 days every route agrees 10 10
Ireland 90 days every route agrees 9 9
Italy 90 days every route agrees 10 10
Japan 90 days every route agrees 20 20
Kenya 90 days every route agrees 21 21
Kiribati 90 days every route agrees 8 8
Lesotho 90 days 14–90 days, depending on passport 13 2
Malaysia 90 days 30–90 days, depending on passport 12 9
Malta 90 days every route agrees 10 10
Montenegro 90 days every route agrees 19 19
Morocco 90 days 30–90 days, depending on passport 21 20
Nepal 90 days every route agrees 20 20
the Netherlands 90 days every route agrees 10 10
Poland 90 days every route agrees 10 10
Portugal 90 days every route agrees 10 10
Romania 90 days every route agrees 10 10
Rwanda 90 days 30–90 days, depending on passport 22 2
Serbia 90 days every route agrees 19 19
Singapore 90 days 30–90 days, depending on passport 4 3
South Africa 90 days 30–90 days, depending on passport 18 17
Spain 90 days every route agrees 10 10
Switzerland 90 days every route agrees 10 10
Taiwan 90 days 14–90 days, depending on passport 19 16
Tanzania 90 days every route agrees 21 21
Thailand 90 days 60–90 days, depending on passport 22 2
Türkiye 90 days 30–90 days, depending on passport 20 18
the United Arab Emirates 90 days 30–90 days, depending on passport 11 9
Uruguay 90 days every route agrees 20 20
Vietnam 90 days 21–90 days, depending on passport 22 11
Sri Lanka 60 days 30–60 days, depending on passport 22 2
the Philippines 59 days 14–59 days, depending on passport 21 1
Cambodia 30 days every route agrees 21 21
the Dominican Republic 30 days every route agrees 20 20
Egypt 30 days every route agrees 21 21
Indonesia 30 days every route agrees 22 22
Laos 30 days 15–30 days, depending on passport 21 19
Maldives 30 days every route agrees 22 22

Read the third column before the second. Where it says every route agrees, the headline is honest: every passport we publish for that destination gets the same allowance, so the ranking figure is also your figure. Where it shows a range, the headline belongs to somebody, but not necessarily to you.

Hong Kong is the clearest warning in the table. Its longest published route sits up in the leading band, and its shortest is measured in days rather than months. Nothing in the headline figure tells you which end you are at. Georgia's range looks alarming in the same column — but a range only tells you the distance between the best and worst routes, not where inside it yours falls. That is the whole argument for checking your own route in the rulebook rather than a league table, this one included.

Long is not the same as resettable

This is the distinction the ranking cannot show, and it is where the real money is.

A per-entry allowance restarts on arrival. Spend it, leave, come back, and a fresh one opens — subject to whatever re-entry rules the destination adds on top. A rolling window does not restart. The officer counts backwards over a fixed period and adds up the days you were present inside it. Leaving stops you spending more, but it does not give anything back; days leave the window only by ageing out. Under a rolling rule a border run buys you nothing at all. Per-entry vs rolling window works through the mechanism in full.

Now apply that to the table above. Of the 1,160 routes we publish that carry a day count, 838 are per-entry and 322 are rolling. 30 destinations count on a rolling window for at least one of our routes, and 13 of those sit outside the Schengen area entirely:

Albania, Barbados, Brazil, Cyprus, Ecuador, India, Kiribati, Montenegro, Peru, Serbia, South Korea, Türkiye, the United Arab Emirates

Now read that list back against the ranking above it, name by name. Some of the destinations at the very top of the ranking appear on it; others do not. As the rulebook stands today, Georgia is absent from it and Albania is present — which is why two destinations that tie on the headline figure are not offering the same thing at all. Georgia's allowance opens fresh on every arrival. Albania's, wherever a rolling window governs the route, is a ceiling across the window no matter how many times you cross the border.

The same trap sits further down. Compare any two destinations in the table that publish the same maximum, then check which of them appears in the rolling list: a per-entry allowance can be repeated, and its rolling twin cannot. Canada and India are the pair worth looking up, and a traveller who plans a year around "one long stay in each, then the same again" will be right about one of them and badly wrong about the other. The shapes that break this rule of thumb in worse ways — annual caps stacked on a per-visit allowance, clocks shared with a neighbouring country — are in the hardest counting rules to get right.

The window lengths are not uniform either. Across our 322 rolling routes:

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

So "rolling" is not a single rule to memorise. The allowance and the window are two separate numbers, and both are on the route page.

What the evidence behind these numbers actually is

Published is not the same as verified, and on this page the difference falls unevenly.

Georgia's year is verified against Georgia's own legal gazette — the ordinance text says citizens of the listed countries may enter and stay "for one full year", and it is filed on the route as an official-tier source. Albania's shorter, rolling allowance is verified too, against the Albanian foreign ministry's visa-regime table plus Law no. 79/2021 on foreigners, article 29(2), which is where the day count actually comes from.

Albania's headline figure — the single longest-stay route that puts Albania level with Georgia at the top of the table — is not verified. It rests on aggregator evidence and is labelled reported on its route page, meaning no official publication has confirmed it. It is the least-evidenced number in the leading band, and the page's own headline figure rests partly on it. Open Albania's and Georgia's routes in the rulebook side by side: the evidence tier, the source and the checked date are printed on every rule, and they do not match.

There is one more honest caveat, and it is ours rather than a government's. India's official source caps tourist stay per calendar year. Our rulebook models it as a rolling window a year long, because exact calendar-period limits are not yet implemented — a known gap in the programme's own backlog. The rolling approximation is stricter than the published rule across a year boundary, so it warns early rather than late, but it is an approximation and the route note says so. The same caveat applies to any destination in the table that counts per calendar year: treat our figure as the right shape rather than an exact reading of the statute, and read the note on the route.

Everything in the table is derived at build time by docs/organic-growth-program/tools/derive-data-cluster.mjs from the same projection that writes the route pages, so a figure here and a figure on a route page cannot disagree. Nothing on this page is typed by hand.

Worked example

Two travellers each want to spend as much of a year as they can in one country, and each picks a destination from the top of the table. One chooses Georgia, the other Albania. The ranking told them the two were equivalent.

The Georgia traveller arrives in March and stays until their allowance is nearly spent. In the autumn they fly to Istanbul for a fortnight, come back, and a fresh allowance opens on arrival — Georgia's rule is per-entry, and Georgia is not on the rolling list above. Over eighteen months they can string together more than one full allowance this way, and the only limits are the ones outside the day count: proof of onward travel, the officer's discretion, and the point at which a tax residency question starts to matter.

The Albania traveller arrives in March on a route governed by a rolling window. They spend their allowance, fly to Italy for a fortnight, and come back expecting the same reset. They do not get one. On the day they land, the officer looks backwards across the window and every day of the spring is still inside it. The trip abroad added a departure day and an arrival day to the count and gave nothing back. Their allowance does not begin to recover until the earliest of those spring days is old enough to fall out of the window — which happens one day at a time, on the calendar, whether they are in Tirana or not.

Same headline number. One traveller gets to repeat it; the other gets it once. The difference was never in the ranking — it was in the counting shape, which is on the route page and not in the headline. Our Schengen 90/180 calculator walks a rolling window forward day by day for the best-known case, and the same arithmetic governs every destination on the rolling list.

Where this does not apply

  • Free movement has no maximum, so it is not in the ranking at all. Of the 1,555 routes we publish, 167 are free-movement rights — an EU/EEA or Swiss passport inside that area, or Irish and British passports under the Common Travel Area. There is no clock, so there is no number, and a blank in our data is not a zero. A further 228 routes carry no day count for other reasons. Only 1,160 routes have a duration to rank.
  • A maximum is a ceiling, not a grant. Every figure here is the longest stay the rule permits. The officer at the border decides what you actually get on the day, and can give less.
  • Calendar-period caps are approximated, not modelled exactly. Where a destination counts per calendar year and we represent it as a rolling window of the same length, the route note says so. Treat those as the right shape rather than a precise reading of the law.
  • Some destinations add caps the shape does not capture. Nepal caps total tourist stay per calendar year on top of the per-visit allowance, and Guatemala's allowance is a regional clock shared with El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua that does not restart when you cross between them. Where we know of a cap like that it is written into the rule's notes.
  • A long tourist allowance is not a work permit or a residence right. None of these numbers say anything about working, and staying a long time can create a tax residency obligation the visa rules are silent about.
  • These are today's published figures. Visa arrangements change, sometimes at short notice. Every route carries its own checked date; re-read the official source before relying on it.

Frequently asked questions

Which country lets you stay the longest without a visa?

In our published rulebook the longest published stay is 365 days, reached at Albania, Georgia. But those destinations are only equivalent on paper. Georgia's is per-entry and restarts when you arrive; Albania is on our rolling-window list, so where a rolling window governs the route the allowance is spent across a window rather than renewed at the border. Nor do they reach it on the same footing — Albania on 1 of its 22 routes, Georgia on 20 of its 21 routes — so check your own route before planning around it. Which shape you are under is the deciding question.

Why does the table show a range instead of one number per country?

Because a country does not have one number — it has one per passport, and we publish 22 of them. Flattening a destination to its best route would be wrong for every reader who does not hold that passport, which for most destinations on this list is nearly all of them. Where every route genuinely does agree, the table says so.

Is a longer allowance always better?

No, and this is the most common expensive mistake. A shorter per-entry allowance you can restart by leaving is often worth more over a year than a longer allowance on a rolling window that you can only spend once. Work out which shape governs your route first; compare the numbers second. Per-entry vs rolling window explains how to tell them apart.

Does leaving and coming back give me a fresh allowance?

Only under a per-entry rule. Under a rolling window it gives you nothing, and it usually costs you: both the day you leave and the day you return count as days of presence under most conventions, so a same-day round trip can spend two days and recover none. See do entry and exit days count.

Are these numbers verified against official sources?

Some are; not all, and we label which is which per route rather than claiming a blanket standard. Georgia's year is checked against the Georgian legal gazette. Albania's longest-stay route rests on aggregator evidence and is labelled reported on its page, meaning no official publication has confirmed it. Every rule shows its own evidence tier, its source and the date we last checked — read those before you book, not this summary.

How many destinations actually publish a day count?

72, out of the destinations in the rulebook. The rest either grant free movement, where there is nothing to count, or have no published duration in our data. Every one of the 22 passports we publish also has its own hub in the rulebook, listing that passport's routes with the day count and counting shape on each — the same corpus read by the passport in your pocket rather than by the destination.

Sources

Count it, don't carry it

Do a stretch. Don't snap.

The counter, the alerts and your documents are free, forever. Coming to the App Store and Google Play — one email when it lands.

Recommended reads

Prices, ratings and features are as published by each product on the date shown; they change — check the store listing before you buy. Stretch is a tracker, not legal advice.