How to Turn Your Flighty Flight History Into a Visa and Residency Day Count

Flighty is built to track your flights. Visa limits and residency tests are about days in a country. Here is how to bridge the two without losing accuracy.

Last verified: June 2026

What Flighty Tracks — and What It Doesn't

Flighty is a flight tracker. It logs the flights you take, follows live status and delays, and turns your history into stats like airports visited, miles flown, and time in the air. For remembering exactly where and when you flew, it is hard to beat.

What it is not built to do is answer the questions visa and residency rules actually ask:

• how many days have I spent in the Schengen area in the last 180 days?
• have I been in this country more than 183 days this year?
• am I about to cross a stay limit on my next trip?

Those questions are about presence measured in days per country, not about flights. Your flight history is the raw material; the day count is a separate calculation built on top of it.

Why Your Flight History Is a Strong Starting Point

For most international travelers, flights are the backbone of the record. Each international flight is a dated border crossing: the destination airport tells you which country you entered, and your next departure tells you roughly when you left by air.

That makes a reasonably complete flight history close to a skeleton of your movements — already dated, and far more reliable than counting from memory. It is one of the better sources when you are rebuilding a travel history from passport stamps, emails, and photos.

The gap is everything between the flights: how long you actually stayed, whether a connection should count, and any travel you did on the ground.

What Has to Happen to Get From Flights to Days

Turning a flight log into a usable day count takes a few steps, whether you do them by hand or let an app do them:

1. Airport to country. Each airport code maps to a country, so an arrival into CDG is an arrival in France and an arrival into NRT is an arrival in Japan.
2. Chaining legs into trips. A journey is usually several flights. Out-and-back legs need to become the trips they represent, not a separate row for every flight.
3. Connections versus stays. A same-day connection through a third country is normally transit and should not add days there. An overnight layover is a judgement call. See Does a Layover Count as Visiting a Country?
4. Counting against a window. Once you have dated stays per country, the count is measured against the relevant rule — a rolling 180-day window for Schengen 90/180, a calendar year for many 183-day residency tests, and so on.

How to Do It in Practice

There are two realistic routes.

The manual route: export your flights from Flighty as a CSV, then work out country stays and tally days in a spreadsheet. It is doable, but it is exactly the kind of calculation that has to be redone every time plans change — and that is where spreadsheets tend to fail.

The faster route: bring the same Flighty export into an app that infers trips and counts days for you. AtlasDays reads a Flighty CSV, maps airports to countries, chains the legs into trips, flags same-day connections as transit, and then counts those days against whatever limit you are tracking. The step-by-step is in Help Center: Flighty Import.

Where Flight History Alone Is Not Enough

Visa and residency questions are high-stakes, so it is worth being honest about what a flight log cannot tell you:

• Ground crossings are invisible. A train from France to Spain or a drive across a land border never appears in a flight history, so a stay that ended on the ground may need its dates adjusted.
• Flights show movement, not where you slept. A connection is not a visit, and a long layover is a grey area. What actually counts as a "day" depends on the rule — see What Counts as a 'Day' for Visa Purposes?
• It is evidence, not proof. A flight history is strong supporting evidence of your movements, but official decisions still rest on stamps, permits, and authority records. If you are assembling a record for an application, see How to Prepare Travel History for a Visa Application.

Putting It to Work for a Specific Rule

Once your flight history is a clean set of dated trips, the same record can answer different rules:

• Schengen 90/180. The count is a rolling 180-day lookback across the whole Schengen area, not per country. The mechanics are in What Does 90 Days in Any 180-Day Period Mean?
• Residency and tax presence. Many systems use a 183-day threshold over a calendar or fiscal year, with their own exceptions. Start with the 183-day tax residency rule.

The point of starting from Flighty is that you only build the record once, then check it against whichever limit applies.

Common Questions

Does Flighty count your days in a country?

No. Flighty logs the flights you take and builds flight stats, but it does not total how many days you have spent in each country or measure that against a visa or residency limit. Day counting is a separate calculation that uses your flight history as its source.

Can Flighty track the Schengen 90/180 rule?

Not directly. Flighty is a flight tracker, not a visa-limit calculator, so it does not keep a rolling 90/180 Schengen total. You can use your Flighty flight history as the source data and count it against the rule in a day-tracking app.

How do I export my travel history from Flighty?

Flighty can export your flight history to a CSV file, which you can save or share to your device. From there you can open it in a spreadsheet or import it into a day-counting app to turn the flights into dated trips.

Are flights enough to prove residency or visa compliance?

Flight history is strong supporting evidence of when you moved between countries, but it is not complete on its own. It does not capture ground crossings or where you stayed between flights, and official decisions still rest on passport stamps, permits, and authority records.

How AtlasDays Helps

AtlasDays is useful when you want your flight history to become a trip record you can check repeatedly against a limit, instead of a calculation you rebuild every time plans change.

You import your Flighty CSV once, review the trips it infers, and from then on the rolling windows and residency thresholds are recalculated from that single record. For the import walkthrough, see Help Center: Flighty Import; for the broader case for keeping one trusted record, see How to Track Your Travel Days.