Are you a non-EU passport holder looking for the best Schengen Visa Calculator so you can stay within the 90/180 rule? Then you’re in the right place. Here’s a review of the most popular 7.

Prefer to watch the video? Here are Skatz and Walter Ego with their opinions!

Top 7 online Schengen Visa Calculators

First of all, here are the testing rules and information.

What is the Schengen Area?

It’s a group of European countries with a common border where they check up on non-EU passport holders going in and out so they don’t overstay.

Which dates are we using as examples?

I found a set of dates in an online example with an answer that I can verify is correct. There were 3 separate holidays taken in 2018/19, one for 45 days, the next for 32 days and the third for 23 days, which is a total of 100 days, spread over a total period of longer than 180 days – this is necessary for the test because of the ‘rolling 180 day period’. Have a look at our video about that here for the full explanation.

Are the answers guaranteed?

It’s worth saying that all of these calculators have a disclaimer on them saying they’re not guaranteeing the results and that they take no responsibility for anything that may or may not happen to you. Even the official European calculator says that.

1/ SchengenVisainfo.com

Here is a picture of the results on SchengenVisainfo.com. As you can see, it says a stay of 80 days, and it doesn’t explain how they’ve arrived at that number, so it looks like there’s something wrong there. It may be because the dates are spread over a period of more than 180 days, but even then it doesn’t quite make sense.

It also says there are only 10 days left, which is wrong. If you look at the last exit date of January 3rd, then look at the Last date to stay of February 7th, you can see that’s more than 10 days. 

Strangely though, that date of February 7th is actually correct. That is the date you’d be fine to stay until. But based on the confusing information, I’d be worried to stay more than 10 days after January 3rd.

As far as features go, the user interface is good, and when you click on the date box to fill it in, it brings up a calendar so you can click on the date, and then when you click on every other date box after that, the default setting is the same month you’ve put in the previous box so you don’t have to click back from today’s date each time. 

That doesn’t make too much difference when the dates you’re putting in are fairly recent, but if they’re back in 2018 like the ones in our example, it saves an awful lot of mouse clicking, which some of the other calculators haven’t thought about. 

Overall I wouldn’t use this calculator. I don’t want one that makes me think ‘I’m not sure’, I want one that I trust COMPLETELY.

2/ SchengenVisas.com

I put in the same dates as before, although on this one they’re all spread out down the side of their webpage so you can’t see them all at once. This website actually had a lot of information on the rest of the page about the 90/180 rule and how to use the calculator.

Some of the information is good, but as you can see on the calculator they’re telling you you’ve overstayed by 10 days. The Schengen Days calculation says ‘100 of 90 days’. But it doesn’t say anything about the rolling 180 day period here in their explanation. In fact it mentions the Schengen Visa quite a lot.

Now, if you’re from the UK, or one of the dozens of other countries who have a waiver from the Schengen Visa, you don’t need to worry about that. But if you’re from any of the countries that do need a Schengen Visa, you’ll have a From date and an Until date on the visa sticker in your passport, so you’ll only have a fixed 180 days, unlike you who have a waiver. Your 180 days is always moving, you just count backwards 180 days from today to work out how many days out of that 180 that you’ve spent in the Schengen Area.

So if your 3 holidays are spread out over a period of longer than 180 days like in our example, then some of the days at the start are outside of the 180 day period by the time you get to the end, to your last exit date, and the 180 days has rolled forward. It does that every day, by one day. That’s what we mean by a rolling 180 days period.

So anyway, back to this calculation, we’ve got a wrong result again as you can see. It says ‘an overstay has occurred in the period from Dec 25th to January 3rd but they’ve not rolled on, so it’s all wrong.

3/ Schengen-Calculator.com

This is called Schengen dash calculator dot com.

It doesn’t work at all. It just gives an error message. So if you own that one, please remove it!

4/ BenidormSeriously.com

Top marks for the name! But is it any good?

Well, it says ‘This schedule is okay!’ Which is lovely and cheerful, but how many days do I have left? It doesn’t say! And the user interface might be fun but this is one of the ones where I had to click my finger to the bone to get to the dates every time!

And the dates are all backwards, I don’t like that at all.

There’s some good information here, but not the information I need.

5/ SchengenAreaCalculator.com

This is from a site called SchengenAreaCalculator.com.

Does it work?

No! You can’t do multiple entry dates, and it doesn’t go back to 2018. I may as well just use a calendar and count with my fingers!

6/ ec.europa.eu

This one looks very official, it’s from the official European site, which is called ec.europa.eu. It’s the most basic looking, but we can forgive that if it gives us the right information and yes, at last it does, we’ve got the right number of days left at 35.

So what about the user interface? Well, that’s pretty good, this is the only site where you can actually type in the dates, which is a lot quicker than searching backwards on the calendar.

Anything wrong with this site? There’s only one negative for me, apart from the look of it and that’s this ‘date of entry/control’ box. This is kind of the date you’re intending to go to the Schengen Area again I think. But it took me a while to understand what date to put in there. I ended up using the day after the final exit date, because I was asking the question ‘how much longer can I stay?’ 

Actually it does sound quite useful, because you might want to set off a few days later so you could put that date in, but I’d have to remember that each time I wanted to use it, and it might be another year before I want to do another multiple trip and I could have forgotten how to use it.

So not top marks then for this one, but it is correct, and it is the official one, although even this one says it’s only a helping tool and it doesn’t give you the right to stay.

7/ Visa-Calculator.com

This is on a site called visa-calculator.com.

What’s good about it? Well, it looks like a friendly interface, and it’s the only one that tells you the number of days of stay in the rolling 180 days, and it says the last day of stay is February 7th which is correct, and underneath it tells you how many days you have left after that. And it gives you some examples of how many days you’d have if you re-entered Schengen on certain days, just to help you understand.

Now it doesn’t have a box like number 6 did to put in your next possible date of entry, but that’s not really a problem, because you can just add another set of dates into the calculator and recalculate, and if it says ‘3 days overstay’ then you just change your final exit date to 3 days earlier. 

There’s also another feature of this site, it has a Log In button, so you can become a member, and it’s got a Facebook page, so you can ask the people who built it questions. I sent them an email as well and they answered quite quickly.

For being a member, it looks like it just lets you keep a record of your trips so you don’t have to keep on inputting all the dates every time, and you can write notes to yourself on there on each holiday.

So I’m giving this one top marks because it has all of the features you need, it’s correct like the official European one, it looks good and it has extra features.

Article by Skatz