# Visa-free days by passport — what your passport actually gets, and why the differences are smaller than you think

> Of the 1,555 passport-to-destination routes Stretch publishes, 1,160 carry a day count and 167 are free-movement rights with no day count at all.

Source: https://doastretch.com/guides/visa-free-days-by-passport/

Guide · Data · 2026

Of the 1,555 passport-to-destination routes Stretch publishes, 1,160 carry a day count and 167 are free-movement rights with no day count at all. Read down the table by passport and the surprise is how little the reach past 90 days moves between passports. A passport with fewer counted routes is not getting fewer days — it has fewer clocks running on it, and for an EU passport that is free movement, which has no day count because there is nothing to count.

By David Toniolo, Do a Stretch · Updated 2026-08-23 · Prices and facts checked 2026-08-23 · 14 min read

## The short answer

**The honest answer to "how many [visa-free days](https://doastretch.com/visa/) does my passport get" is a table, not a number** — and once you read the table, the striking thing is how little the day allowances move between passports.

Stretch publishes 1,555 passport-to-destination routes across 22 passports. 1,160 of those routes carry a day count. 167 are free-movement rights, which carry no day count because there is nothing to count. The remaining 228 publish the entry rule without a stay length, and say so on their own page rather than showing a number.

Here is every passport we publish, with its own denominator beside every count:

| Passport | Published routes | With a day count | Free movement | No recorded day count | Over 90 days | Rolling window | Longest |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| US passport | 71 | 66 | 0 | 5 | 12 | 24 | Albania, 365 days |
| Canadian passport | 71 | 68 | 0 | 3 | 11 | 25 | Georgia, 365 days |
| New Zealand passport | 66 | 62 | 1 | 3 | 11 | 23 | Georgia, 365 days |
| UK passport | 71 | 67 | 1 | 3 | 11 | 26 | Georgia, 365 days |
| Singapore passport | 71 | 67 | 0 | 4 | 10 | 23 | Georgia, 365 days |
| Australian passport | 71 | 65 | 1 | 5 | 8 | 24 | Georgia, 365 days |
| Brazilian passport | 71 | 60 | 0 | 11 | 8 | 25 | Georgia, 365 days |
| French passport | 71 | 48 | 18 | 5 | 8 | 8 | Georgia, 365 days |
| German passport | 71 | 48 | 18 | 5 | 8 | 8 | Georgia, 365 days |
| Japanese passport | 71 | 67 | 0 | 4 | 8 | 23 | Georgia, 365 days |
| South Korean passport | 71 | 65 | 0 | 6 | 8 | 22 | Georgia, 365 days |
| Dutch passport | 71 | 49 | 18 | 4 | 7 | 10 | Georgia, 365 days |
| Irish passport | 71 | 46 | 19 | 6 | 7 | 6 | Georgia, 365 days |
| Mexican passport | 70 | 60 | 0 | 10 | 7 | 24 | Georgia, 365 days |
| Portuguese passport | 71 | 47 | 18 | 6 | 7 | 9 | Georgia, 365 days |
| South African passport | 70 | 37 | 0 | 33 | 7 | 4 | Georgia, 365 days |
| Spanish passport | 71 | 47 | 18 | 6 | 7 | 8 | Georgia, 365 days |
| Italian passport | 71 | 48 | 18 | 5 | 6 | 9 | Georgia, 365 days |
| Swedish passport | 72 | 46 | 19 | 7 | 6 | 9 | Georgia, 365 days |
| Swiss passport | 71 | 49 | 18 | 4 | 6 | 8 | Georgia, 365 days |
| Indian passport | 70 | 21 | 0 | 49 | 2 | 1 | Dominica, 180 days |
| Philippine passport | 71 | 27 | 0 | 44 | 1 | 3 | India, 180 days |

Three things to take from it, in order of how badly they are usually got wrong.

**A low "with a day count" figure is not a worse passport.** That column counts routes with a clock on them, and a route can have no clock because there is nothing to count. A Dutch citizen going to Spain is not spending a visitor allowance; they are exercising a right of residence. Our rulebook records that as a free-movement route with no day number, because inventing one would be false. 12 of our 22 passports hold a right like that somewhere — Australian, Dutch, French, German, Irish, Italian, New Zealand, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Swiss, UK — and those are the passports that show the *fewest* counted routes. The table prints free movement and no-recorded-length in their own columns, so you can read which of the two a low figure is instead of inferring it. Read the counted column as "how many of my routes are on a clock", never as "how many days I get".

**The reach past 90 days is narrow for everyone.** Sorted by the "over 90 days" column — which is how the table above is ordered — the Canadian and US passports come first, the UK and New Zealand passports next, and then it flattens almost immediately. [Where those long stays actually are](https://doastretch.com/guides/longest-visa-free-stays/) is a different table, and a long allowance you cannot repeat is worth less than a shorter one you can. There is no passport in our published set for which stays longer than 90 days are anything but the exception: it is a short list at the top of the table and an empty one at the bottom.

**The column that really separates passports is "rolling window", not "over 90 days".** That column counts how many of your routes are governed by a look-back rather than a per-entry allowance — and [a rolling window is the shape that catches people out](https://doastretch.com/guides/per-entry-vs-rolling-window/), because leaving does not reset it. Passports whose Schengen access is a free-movement right barely appear in that column at all. Passports that visit Schengen as visitors sit near the top of it.

## What each column actually counts

Every figure in the table is derived from the same projection that writes our route pages, so the page and the table cannot disagree.

- **Published routes** — the passport-to-destination pairs we publish a page for. This is the denominator for everything to its right, and it is not identical for every passport: where we have no rule we would publish for a pair, there is no route to count.
- **With a day count** — the subset of those routes with a recorded number of days and a recorded way of counting them. A route is excluded here if it is a free-movement right, or if the entry rule is published without a stay length.
- **Free movement** — routes where a treaty gives a right of entry and residence, so there is no day limit to record. Not "zero days": no clock.
- **No recorded day count** — routes where we publish the entry rule but not a stay length, because the length is set by the visa you are granted or because no source we trust states one. Those three columns add up to "published routes" on every row, and that is the point of printing all three: the gap between the first two has two halves that mean opposite things, and subtracting one number from another cannot tell you which half you are looking at.
- **Over 90 days** — how many of the counted routes allow more than 90 days. A destination, not a stay: it means the published allowance exceeds 90, not that you may string stays together to reach it.
- **Rolling window** — how many of the counted routes count on a look-back window rather than per entry. See [per-entry vs rolling window](https://doastretch.com/guides/per-entry-vs-rolling-window/) for why that distinction decides whether leaving helps. [The shapes that are neither](https://doastretch.com/guides/hardest-visa-counting-rules/) — an annual cap stacked on a per-visit allowance, a clock shared with a neighbour — are not in this column, because our arithmetic does not model them.
- **Longest** — the single longest published allowance available to that passport in our catalogue. 72 destinations carry a day count for at least one passport, and the longest allowance anywhere in the corpus is 365 days, at Albania, Georgia. Which of them your passport can actually use is the point of the column: a destination's headline number is the best deal it publishes to anybody, not the deal it publishes to you.

## Why an EU passport shows fewer counted routes

This is the number most likely to be read backwards, so it is worth being blunt about it.

Two different things keep a published route out of the "with a day count" column. One is **free movement**: a right of entry and residence under a treaty, with no day limit to record. The other is **no recorded stay length**: the entry rule is known, but the length is set by a visa you are granted, or no source we trust states one. Corpus-wide those are 167 and 228 routes respectively, of 1,555 published — and the table above now carries the same split per passport, in its own two columns. So a low counted figure does not have to be guessed at: read across the row and it says which of the two it is. Neither of them means "fewer days".

For an EU, EEA or Swiss passport, the first reason is the structural one. Free movement inside that area is a right under [Directive 2004/38/EC](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2004/38/oj), not a visitor allowance, and in our rulebook the free-movement rule wins wherever it applies — so **every** EU, EEA or Swiss destination in our catalogue is an uncounted route for that passport, by construction rather than by coincidence. What those routes carry instead of a number is the treaty they rest on: no day count, and no last-checked date on a day count that does not exist. It is not an EU-only story, either: an Irish passport carries the same kind of right towards the UK, and a British one towards Ireland, through the [Common Travel Area](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/common-travel-area-guidance); Australian and New Zealand passports carry one towards each other under the Trans-Tasman arrangement. Every one of those routes is a right in our rulebook, and none of them has a day count.

So the comparison people want to make — "Canadian passport, more counted routes, therefore better" — inverts the truth on exactly the routes that matter most to someone living in Europe. The Canadian has a number on Spain because the Canadian is on a clock in Spain. The Dutch citizen has no number because nobody is counting.

**And the same low figure means the opposite thing at the other end of the table.** Our rulebook models three free-movement blocs and no more: the EU/EEA plus Switzerland, the Common Travel Area, and the Trans-Tasman arrangement. That is why the list above is 12 passports and not all 22. A passport in none of them — an Indian, Philippine or South African passport, for instance — cannot have a low counted figure for the free-movement reason, because no bloc covers it. Its uncounted routes are the other kind: a visa is required and the length of stay is whatever that visa grants, so there is no visa-free day count to publish. Fewer counted routes is genuinely a narrower set of doors there. Two passports can sit on the same number in that column for opposite reasons, which is exactly why the column needs reading rather than ranking.

## Worked example

Two travellers plan the identical six months: Lisbon, then Berlin, then Tbilisi, then back to Lisbon.

**The Dutch traveller.** Lisbon and Berlin are free movement — a right of residence, no allowance, nothing to track, no exit date forced by a day count. Georgia is a visitor allowance and does carry a number, so that is the one leg with a clock on it. One route to count out of the whole trip.

**The Canadian traveller.** Lisbon and Berlin are one clock, not two: the Schengen area counts as a single zone, 90 days in any rolling 180 across all of it, so the Portuguese days and the German days go into the same total. The Georgian leg is a separate per-entry allowance. Coming back to Lisbon at the end re-opens the Schengen question with the earlier days still inside the look-back window — and none of the time in Georgia has aged any of them off, because the window ages days by the calendar, not by where you were.

Same itinerary, same dates. The Dutch traveller has one number to watch; the Canadian has a rolling window that spans three of the four legs and follows them home. In the table above that difference is the "rolling window" column doing its job — and it is a far better description of what a passport is like to live with than the day counts are.

## Where this does not apply

- **These are our published routes, not the world.** Our catalogue is the places people on the move actually go, not every country on earth. A passport's "published routes" figure is a count of our coverage for that passport, not a global visa-free score. Comparing it to a passport-ranking index measures two different things.
- **Published is not verified.** Every route carries its own confidence label, its source and the date we checked it, and they are not all equally strong — some are official-tier, some weaker, and the route page says which. A count of published routes tells you nothing about how sure we are of any one of them; read the route page for that.
- **A passport is not the whole question.** Residence permits, dual nationality, purpose of travel and previous refusals all change the answer, and none of them is in this table. The table answers "what does this passport get, as a tourist, on the ordinary route".
- **"Over 90 days" is per destination, not per trip.** It says that destination's published allowance exceeds 90 days for that passport. It does not say the days may be stacked, that re-entry is unrestricted, or that another cap does not sit on top of the per-visit allowance — several destinations add one.
- **Calendar-period rules are not yet modelled exactly.** Where a country counts per calendar year rather than on a rolling basis, our data may represent that as a rolling 365-day window. That is an approximation of the shape, and the affected route pages say so.
- **Free movement is a right, not an absence of rules.** Directive 2004/38/EC gives an unconditional right of residence for the first three months; beyond that it attaches conditions — working, being self-sufficient, studying — and several member states require registration. "No day count" means no visitor clock, not no obligations.
- **The officer at the border decides.** Everything here describes how the rules are written, not what happens at a desk on a bad day.

## Frequently asked questions

**Which passport gets the most visa-free days?**

Not a question with a clean answer, and the table above is why. Ordered by destinations allowing more than 90 days, the Canadian and US passports lead, with the UK and New Zealand close behind — but the spread across the middle of the table is narrow enough that the ranking barely means anything. And the column ignores free movement entirely, because free movement has no days to count. "Most days" and "best passport" are different questions, and the day counts answer neither on their own.

**Is an EU passport worse than a Canadian one because it has fewer counted routes?**

No — that reading is backwards. Fewer counted routes means fewer routes with a clock on them. Inside the EU, EEA and Switzerland an EU passport confers a right of residence rather than a visitor allowance, so there is no day count to publish. A Canadian visiting the same countries gets a number precisely because the days are being counted.

**Why do some passports show fewer published routes than others?**

Because coverage is per route, not per passport. Where we have no rule we would publish for a particular pair, that route does not exist on the site, so the denominator moves slightly between passports. That is a fact about our catalogue, not about the passport — which is why every count on this page is shown next to its own denominator rather than as a share of some fixed total.

**Does "over 90 days" mean I can stay that long in one visit?**

It means the published allowance for that route exceeds 90 days. Whether you can use it in one visit depends on the counting shape: a per-entry allowance is available on each arrival, while a rolling window caps how much of it you can spend in any look-back period. The two behave completely differently, and the route page states which one governs.

**How do I see the list for my own passport?**

Every passport in the table above has its own hub, and [the rulebook index](https://doastretch.com/visa/) links all of them under "By passport". Each hub lists every destination we publish for that passport, with the entry rule, the stay, the source and how sure we are — and every row opens to the full route page. Start there rather than from this table: the table is the shape of a passport's set, the hub is the set itself.

**Will these numbers change?**

Yes, and they are meant to. The table is regenerated from the rulebook on every build, so it moves when the rules move. The prose around it is written by a person and dated at the top of this page — if the two ever disagree, trust the table and tell us.

## Sources

- [Directive 2004/38/EC](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2004/38/oj) on the right of EU citizens and their family members to move and reside freely within the Member States — the instrument behind every free-movement route in the table, and the reason those routes carry no day count. Read 23 August 2026; re-read before relying on this.
- [Regulation (EU) 2016/399, the Schengen Borders Code](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A02016R0399-20240101), Article 6(1), which sets the 90-days-in-any-180-day short-stay limit that governs the Schengen legs of the worked example. Read 23 August 2026; re-read before relying on this.
- [Regulation (EU) 2018/1806](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32018R1806), which lists the nationalities exempt from the short-stay visa requirement — the source of much of the variation between passports in the table. Read 23 August 2026; re-read before relying on this.
- [The European Commission's short-stay visa calculator](https://ec.europa.eu/assets/home/visa-calculator/calculator.htm), the official implementation of that look-back, for checking a rolling-window leg yourself. Read 23 August 2026; re-read before relying on this.
- The per-passport figures are derived from the Stretch rulebook by `docs/organic-growth-program/tools/derive-data-cluster.mjs`, which imports the same `projectRoutes()` and `countingFacts()` the site build calls before writing the route pages — so a number here and a number on a route page cannot disagree. Substituted into this page at build time on 23 August 2026; each individual rule carries its own official source and checked date on [its route page](https://doastretch.com/visa/).

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## Recommended reads

- [Where can you stay visa-free the longest? The published maximums \[2026\]](https://doastretch.com/guides/longest-visa-free-stays/)
- [The hardest visa counting rules to get right \[2026\]](https://doastretch.com/guides/hardest-visa-counting-rules/)
- [Per-entry or rolling window? The two ways countries count your days \[2026\]](https://doastretch.com/guides/per-entry-vs-rolling-window/)
- [Do arrival and departure days count towards your visa days? \[2026\]](https://doastretch.com/guides/do-entry-and-exit-days-count/)

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