Residence day counter

Record your stays

How days are counted

The counting rule is set out in Schedule 45 to the Finance Act 2013 and explained in HMRC's RDR3 guidance note. Both are linked at the foot of this page, and both are worth reading in full before relying on any count.

The midnight rule

A day counts as a day spent in the UK if the person is present in the UK at the end of that day. Arrival day therefore counts and departure day does not, which is why the count above is a count of nights: from the arrival date up to the night before departure.

Transit days

A day spent passing through the UK, arriving as a passenger and departing the following day, is not treated as a day of presence provided nothing is done between arrival and departure that is substantially unrelated to that passage through the UK. Stopping to attend a meeting takes the day outside the exception. This tool cannot tell which of your stays were transit, and it does not apply the exception. Enter the stay as normal and use the note field to record why you believe it was transit. Whether the exception applies is your adviser's judgement, and they will want the day in the record either way.

The deeming rule, which this tool cannot compute

Days present in the UK without being present at midnight can still be counted. Where someone was UK resident in at least one of the three previous tax years and has at least three UK ties, and is present in the UK at some point on more than 30 days in the tax year without being present at the end of any of them, every such day beyond the first 30 is treated as a day spent in the UK.

That rule depends on tie counts and on prior-year status, neither of which this tool holds. If daytime visits are a regular feature of your year, the count above will be lower than the figure your adviser works to, and the gap matters. Record those days separately.

Exceptional circumstances

Days when someone would not be in the UK but for exceptional circumstances beyond their control, and intends to leave as soon as those circumstances permit, can be disregarded. The conditions are strict and the maximum that may be disregarded in a tax year is 60 days. This tool does not attempt to apply it. Where you think a stay falls within it, keep the evidence contemporaneously and put it to your adviser.

The published thresholds

These are the published tables, reproduced here for you to use with your adviser. They are not applied to your count above, and a day figure on its own settles nothing: the tests below turn on work, homes, family and prior years as much as on days.

The automatic overseas tests

Meeting any one of these makes a person non-UK resident for the tax year, and the rest of the test is not reached.

• Fewer than 16 days in the UK, where the person was UK resident in one or more of the three previous tax years.
• Fewer than 46 days in the UK, where the person was not UK resident in any of the three previous tax years.
• Full-time work overseas, with fewer than 91 days in the UK, of which fewer than 31 are days working more than three hours in the UK.

The automatic UK tests

Where no automatic overseas test is met, meeting any one of these makes a person UK resident for the tax year.

• 183 days or more in the UK in the tax year.
• The second automatic UK test, often called the only-home test: having a home in the UK, being present there on at least 30 days in the tax year, and over a period of at least 91 consecutive days having either no overseas home or an overseas home used on fewer than 30 days, with the conditions set out in the legislation.
• Full-time work in the UK over a 365-day period, subject to conditions.

Sufficient ties: days against ties

Where neither set of automatic tests settles the position, the outcome turns on how many UK ties the person has against how many days they spent here. The ties are the family tie, the accommodation tie, the work tie (40 or more days working more than three hours in the UK), the 90-day tie (more than 90 days in the UK in either of the two previous tax years), and, for leavers only, the country tie (more midnights in the UK than in any other single country).

Arrivers are people who were not UK resident in any of the three previous tax years. Leavers were UK resident in one or more of them. The figures are the number of ties at which the person is UK resident for that band of days.

What this tool deliberately does not do

It counts days. It does not count ties, it does not know your working hours, it does not know where your homes are, it does not know your position in the three previous tax years, and it does not attempt split year treatment, which has eight cases and is out of scope here entirely.

It therefore does not, and will not, tell you what your residence position is. That is deliberate. A tool that produced an answer from a day count would be producing a confident answer from a fraction of the inputs, and the error would be measured in a way nobody wants to measure it. The determination is your tax adviser's work, and this tool exists to give them a clean count to start from.

Two consequences worth stating plainly. Where the deeming rule applies to you, the figure here will understate your position. Where a stay was genuine transit or fell within exceptional circumstances, it may overstate it. Both need a person, not a script.

Keeping your own record

Day counts get challenged years after the fact, and a contemporaneous record made at the time is worth considerably more than a reconstruction made under pressure. Boarding passes, calendar entries and card statements are the corroboration; the count is the index to them.

The export button produces a CSV of your stays with the per-tax-year totals. That file is yours. Keep it with the underlying evidence, in whatever your family already uses for records that have to survive a change of adviser or a change of device.

This page does not become that record, and it is built so that it cannot. Entries live in one browser on one device, they are never sent here, and I hold nothing. Clear your browser data and they are gone. That is the correct trade: the record belongs with you and your adviser, not with a website.

Sources

• RDR3: Statutory Residence Test (SRT) notes, HM Revenue and Customs guidance note.
• Finance Act 2013, Schedule 45: statutory residence test, legislation.gov.uk.
• Residence, Domicile and Remittance Basis Manual, HMRC internal manual.
• Tax on foreign income: UK residence and tax, gov.uk.

Further reading

The guide to UK tax residence sets out the same rules in prose, with the parts that most often catch people out. Where the question is a planned departure rather than a count, leaving the UK covers what tends to need doing, and in what order.