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I am a US citizen considering a job with a UK company. The duration of the job will be about one year and have me traveling in and out of UK/Schengen area. I will be in the UK on a Tier 5 visa and my employer is working out the details of my time in the Schengen area. My wife and one year old son (both US citizens) will be traveling with me. We are trying to work out their travel and have a question.

We undersatand the 90/180 day rule and have calculated the time we will be in the Schengen area very carefully. January 14 will be their 90th day in Schengen as well as their 180th day since first entering. My question is what happens on January 15? It will be day one of a new 90/180. Can they just continue on with their travels or will they need to leave the area on the 14th and re-enter on the 15th to "restart" their 180 day counter? Could they just visit a local consulate to get a new stamp?

Thanks for any help you can offer.

Uly
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1 Answers1

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As I see it, the Original Poster (OP) is making a sincere and diligent attempt to comply with the Schengen regulations about overstaying.

The rule itself is fundamentally straight-forward… Briefly a person becomes an overstayer on their 91st consecutive day inside the zone. The day count is measured from the present day and extending back for 180 days.

The OP is struggling because he essentially has something ass-about-face. He asks…

How do we begin a new 180 days?

And the answer is: you don’t. What’s happened here is that the OP has it that the 180 period is a forward looking time window. So from that viewpoint it seems natural that a person can ‘renew’ their 180 days and thereby spend more time in the zone. But it doesn’t work like that. You cannot ‘renew’ or ‘refresh’ it.

As alluded to above, the 180 day period is a backward-looking time window. For any given day, you look backward into the previous 180 days (present day included) and count the number of days you were in the Schengen zone. If that number exceeds 90, you’re an overstayer plain and simple. This rule holds true even for non-visa nationals like Americans, Canadians, and so on.

Schengen overstayers get caught on their way out when they encounter an exit check. Sometimes the authorities don’t notice and other times they do. If a person gets caught, the authorities have a menu where they can select any of the following: scolding, fines, incarceration, and expulsion.

A possible source of confusion lies in the way other regulatory schemes work, like the UK. There, when your ‘visa’ expires, you need to ‘channel hop’ to get a new 6 months (as long as you can pass the landing interview).

Reference

Hanky Panky
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