How to Track Days in Each Country: 6 Methods Compared

Q: What is the easiest way to track days spent in each country?

Keep one list of trips with entry and exit dates and let something count it for you. AtlasDays does this with the least upkeep, since it counts every window as you add trips; a spreadsheet works if you keep one row per day and update it after every trip. Rebuild older years from photos, flight logs, location history, and official records.

Q: Can Google Maps Timeline tell me how many days I spent in a country?

Not directly. Timeline shows the places you visited if it was switched on, and on an iPhone you can export it from the Maps app as a location-history.json file, but it does not total days per country. Its data now lives on your phone, and auto-delete may already have removed older history.

Q: Can I track the Schengen 90/180 rule in a spreadsheet?

Yes. Use one row per calendar day, mark each day you were in the Schengen area with a 1, and use SUMIFS to add up the 180 days ending on the date you are checking. One row per trip makes the window edges and overlapping trips easy to get wrong.

Spreadsheets, phone location history, photos, flight logs, official records, and AtlasDays compared: what each one gets right, where it leaves gaps, and which ones can handle a rolling 180-day window.

Last verified: September 2026

In short: the method that holds up is a list of dated trips, kept as you travel, with a calculation that counts the days per country and per window. A spreadsheet can do that if you keep one row per day. AtlasDays does it for you: add a trip, or let Auto-Detect add it, and every count updates. Location history, photos, and flight logs are best for rebuilding the past, and official records are the strongest evidence, but none of those four gives you a running count on its own.

The six methods side by side

Spreadsheet

Effort: High, every trip
Accuracy: As good as your entries
Main gaps: Anything you forget to log
Rolling windows: Yes, with one row per day and a window formula

Phone location history

Effort: Low once it is on
Accuracy: Good for where you were
Main gaps: Periods it was off, auto-deleted history, raw data to process
Rolling windows: No, you count it yourself

Photos

Effort: Low
Accuracy: Good on days you took geotagged photos
Main gaps: Days without photos, exact crossing times
Rolling windows: No

Flight history

Effort: Low
Accuracy: Exact for flights
Main gaps: Ground crossings, layovers, flights never logged
Rolling windows: No

Official records

Effort: Medium to high
Accuracy: Strongest evidence for that country
Main gaps: One country per request, no view of planned trips
Rolling windows: No

AtlasDays

Effort: Low to medium
Accuracy: As good as the trips you confirm
Main gaps: Detected and imported trips still need review
Rolling windows: Yes, built in

The methods are not rivals. The usual pattern is to rebuild the past from location history, photos, flights, and records, then keep one running list from today on.

1. A spreadsheet

A spreadsheet is free, transparent, and fully under your control. Its weakness is not arithmetic, it is upkeep: every trip has to be entered by hand, and a missed trip or wrong date changes every total built on it without any warning.

The layout decides whether it can handle a rolling window. With one row per trip, every total has to clip trips at the window's edges, and two rows that overlap count the same days twice. With one row per calendar day, a window is just a date filter:

Put every date you need in column A, one per row, filled down without gaps.
Give each place you track its own column, for example B for the Schengen area, and enter 1 on each day you were there for any part of the day. A travel day gets a 1 in both places.
Put the date you want to check in E1, and in another cell enter =SUMIFS(B:B, A:A, ">="&(E1-179), A:A, "<="&E1). That adds up the Schengen days in the 180 days ending on E1, including E1 itself. The same formula works in Excel and Google Sheets.

Checking 30 June 2026. The 180-day window runs from 2 January to 30 June 2026. You were in the Schengen area from 1 December 2025 to 5 January 2026, from 10 to 31 March, and from 15 May to 30 June. Only 2–5 January of the first trip falls inside the window, which is 4 days. March adds 22 and May to June adds 47. The formula returns 73 days. Adding the three trips in full gives 105, which would wrongly suggest you were already over 90.

This counts every marked day, including arrival and departure days. Not every rule does that, so check what counts as a day under the rule you are tracking. The Schengen rolling window walkthrough shows how the window moves day by day.

2. Phone location history

If location history was switched on, it can show where you were on dates you no longer remember. It works best as a source for rebuilding the past, not as a count.

Google Maps Timeline now stores its data on your device. As of September 2026, Google's help pages say Timeline is not available in Maps on a computer. On an iPhone you can export it from the Maps app settings as a file named location-history.json, and you can turn on an encrypted backup. Auto-delete can be set to 3, 18, or 36 months, so older history may already be gone. The export is raw visits and routes that you still have to turn into days per country yourself.
iPhone Significant Locations is something Apple describes as a record of places you have recently been, used to personalize features such as Memories in Photos. It is not a travel log you can count from, and it will not reach back years.

3. Photos

Photos taken with location turned on carry a timestamp and coordinates, which makes a photo library a surprisingly good diary of where you were. The gaps are the days you took no photos, photos without location data, and the exact moment you crossed a border, which a photo rarely shows. AtlasDays can scan your photo library on the device, group the locations into suggested trips, and save nothing until you have reviewed them. See Help Center: Photo Import.

4. Flight history

A flight log from an app or airline account is a dated list of border crossings by air, which is close to a skeleton of your movements. It misses every train, drive, and ferry, and a connection is not a stay. How to turn your Flighty flight history into a day count covers the method, including how to treat layovers.

5. Official records

Some governments let you request or view your own entry and exit records. For the country that keeps them, they carry the most weight, and they are the right thing to check a disputed date against. But you get them one country at a time, and they only look backward, so they cannot tell you whether next month's trip fits a limit. How to get your official entry and exit records lists where to ask.

6. AtlasDays

AtlasDays keeps the trip list and does the window arithmetic for you, for the trips you have taken and the ones you are planning. It counts rolling windows as well as calendar years, keeps uncertain dates apart from exact ones, shows you imported trips before saving them, and exports your record when an application asks for it. How it handles each step:

Getting trips in. You can add trips by hand, import them from photos, a CSV file, or Flighty, or turn on Auto-Detect Trips, which adds a trip when your iPhone notices you have crossed into another country. A detected trip can be undone, edited, or deleted. Imports save nothing until you approve them.
Date quality. A trip has exact dates, or you can save it as Year Only when you know the year but not the dates. Year Only trips mark a country as visited but never feed a day count or tracker.
Transit. An airside connection is saved with the Transit purpose. It stays in your history but adds zero days and does not mark the country as visited.
Mistakes. Overlapping trips are flagged and can be resolved from the trip itself. Imports flag duplicates and overlaps before saving, and Manage Imports in Settings removes a whole import at once if one went wrong.
Counting. Trackers recalculate from the trip list, so correcting one date updates every total that depends on it. One tracker is free; more need AtlasDays Pro.
Export. A spreadsheet or a Country Presence Report PDF, with AtlasDays Pro.
Privacy. There is no account. Your trips stay on your device unless you turn on iCloud Sync, which keeps them in your own iCloud account.

What makes any method reliable

Trips with dates are the record. Totals per country can always be recalculated from dated trips. A total with no trips behind it cannot be checked or corrected.
Mark uncertain dates as uncertain. A guessed exact date looks as trustworthy as a real one. Keep "sometime in 2019" separate from dates you can support.
Record transit as transit. If you never noted that a stop was airside, you cannot later apply a rule that treats it differently.
Keep one source of truth. A sheet for tax, a list for visas, and an export for an application will contradict each other sooner or later. Keep one list and count it several ways.

Beyond the day count

A clean record answers "how many days", but each rule decides which days qualify. The Schengen 90/180 rule, the 183-day tax residency rule, and residence-permit absence rules count the same trips differently. If you need your history for an application, preparing travel history for a visa application covers what a caseworker expects to see.

AtlasDays counts your days in every country automatically

Add trips by hand, import them from Photos or Flighty, or let Auto-Detect add them as you cross borders. AtlasDays keeps one dated record, privately on your iPhone, and counts it against limits like the Schengen 90/180 Short-Stay Rule.

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FAQ

What is the easiest way to track days spent in each country?

Keep one list of trips with entry and exit dates and let something count it for you. AtlasDays does this with the least upkeep, since it counts every window as you add trips; a spreadsheet works if you keep one row per day and update it after every trip. Rebuild older years from photos, flight logs, location history, and official records.

Can Google Maps Timeline tell me how many days I spent in a country?

Not directly. Timeline shows the places you visited if it was switched on, and on an iPhone you can export it from the Maps app as a location-history.json file, but it does not total days per country. Its data now lives on your phone, and auto-delete may already have removed older history.

Can I track the Schengen 90/180 rule in a spreadsheet?

Yes. Use one row per calendar day, mark each day you were in the Schengen area with a 1, and use SUMIFS to add up the 180 days ending on the date you are checking. One row per trip makes the window edges and overlapping trips easy to get wrong.

About this article: AtlasDays provides general information, not legal, tax, or immigration advice. Rules change and outcomes depend on your circumstances, so never rely on it alone: check the linked official source or ask a qualified professional.