How to check your remaining Schengen days with EES

The EU’s official “Check how long you can stay” tool tells non-EU visitors whether their entry is allowed (‘OK’ or ‘not OK’) and how many days of their 90-day Schengen allowance remain, using Entry/Exit System records. It does not count any visit that began before 10 April 2026, so anyone with a longer spring trip should add those days by hand.

What do you need to enter?

The tool asks for four things: the European country you are visiting or plan to visit, your travel document type (a passport for almost everyone), the document number, and the three-letter code of the country that issued it, such as GBR for the UK, USA for the United States or AUS for Australia. The code is printed on your passport’s data page.

Dates are optional, and they change the question the tool answers. Give an intended arrival date to see how long a future trip could last. Give a departure date if you are already in Europe. Give both to see how many days you will have left once a planned trip is over. With no entry date, the tool uses today.

What does the result tell you?

You get ‘OK’ or ‘not OK’ for the entry, plus the remaining days of authorised stay at the moment of entry or exit. The tool’s own notes say the figure is calculated from the dates you typed in and may vary with your actual dates of entry and exit. For visa holders it is also capped at the visa’s expiry date. The same notes say the ‘OK’ or ‘not OK’ answer cannot be read as a decision to grant or refuse entry, and that it is based on the information added at the border. The form asks for no account and no payment.

What does “Remaining days at the moment of entry” mean?

The result screen uses fixed labels. These are the English labels exactly as they appear in the text of the EU’s tool page, with what each one means:

• “Authorised stay:” is the heading for the verdict. Under it you see one of three answers.
• “OK”means that, on the dates you gave, your stay fits inside your allowance (and, for visa holders, your visa). The tool’s own note says “the answer ‘OK’ or ‘NOT OK’ cannot be interpreted as a decision to grant or refuse entry to the Schengen Area.” The border officer still decides.
• “NOT OK” means the records show the stay you asked about would not fit your allowance on those dates, or, for a single-entry or double-entry visa, that its entries are used up. Check the dates you typed first, then your record (see below).
• “Not available”means no verdict and no day count. The tool’s text pairs it with the note “Calculation of the remaining days of authorised stay is not available during transitional period.” The EES FAQs say the rollout lasted until 9 April 2026 and the automated calculator started the next day, so if you see this now, count your days by hand and ask the authorities named in the next section.
• “Remaining days at the moment of entry:” is how many days you would have in hand on the arrival date you entered, or today if you entered none. In practice it is the longest stay you could start that day.
• “Remaining days at the moment of exit:” is how many days you would still have left on the departure date you entered, once that trip is over. “Remaining days at the moment of exit: 3” means you would leave with three days unused. The figure grows again later, as older days drop out of the 180-day window.
• “are capped according to the expiration date of the short stay visa” ends the note under either figure when you hold a visa. The number stops at your visa’s expiry date, even if your 90-day allowance would let you stay longer.
• “Member States for which the calculation is applicable:” lists the countries the result covers. Holders of a visa valid only for some countries may see “Member States for which the limited territorial validity visa is applicable:”, and “Calculation of the stay is applicable only for following country:” means the figure applies to the one country named.

One of four notes appears above the figures and tells you which dates the tool worked from. Each says the result “may vary depending on the actual date of entry and exit”:

• “calculated on the basis of provided dates by the non-EU national”: you gave both an arrival and a departure date.
• “calculated only for the entry date”: you gave an arrival date only, so there is no exit figure.
• “calculated on the basis of the calendar date of the query as the entry date”: you gave a departure date only, so the tool treated the day you ran the check as your entry date.
• “calculated on the basis of today’s date of the query as the entry date”: you gave no dates, so the tool used today.

The final note, “the answer was calculated based on the information added at the border,” matters most. The tool only knows what officers recorded. Under Article 13 of the EES Regulation, it reads from a separate copy of EES data that is updated daily, so a crossing you made today may not show until the next update.

What does “cannot currently be calculated” mean?

The full wording, taken from the tool’s published text, is: “Your remaining authorised stay cannot currently be calculated due to temporary incomplete data in the Entry/Exit System.” It means the tool could not produce a figure from the records it holds for your passport. It is not a refusal, and the EU does not describe it as one.

The EU’s pages give three routes when the online tool cannot help. The EES FAQs say questions about your remaining stay or the tool’s result go to the competent authorities of the country where you last entered or left the Schengen area (or, if you have not visited since 10 April 2026, the country you plan to visit). The EES data page says you have the right to receive information from passport control officers on the maximum remaining duration of your authorised stay, and the tool page adds that some external borders have equipment that runs the same check. In the meantime, count your days yourself with the European Commission’s short-stay calculator or our Schengen 90/180 calculator, and try the tool again later, since the message describes the gap as temporary.

Which trips does the tool leave out?

The tool page is explicit: the remaining authorised stay “does NOT reflect any time spent in the Schengen area that began before 10 April 2026, regardless of whether the visit ended before or continued after that date.” The EES FAQs give the background. During the six-month rollout that started on 12 October 2025, passport stamps and electronic records ran side by side, and the automated calculator only started on 10 April 2026, when stamping ended.

Since 7 October 2026 the 180-day window has started after 10 April, so trips that both began and ended before then no longer matter. The trap that remains is a stay that started before 10 April and carried on after it. The tool ignores the whole visit, including the days after 10 April that still sit inside your window. For a check made on 13 October 2026 the window starts on 17 April. Someone who stayed from 1 April to 30 June has 75 uncounted days in that window, and the last of them only leaves the window on 27 December 2026. If that is you, the tool will overstate your allowance. Work out the real figure by hand before you book.

Does the tool work for visa holders?

Yes. The tool page carried a dated caveat that ended on 6 October 2026 inclusive: the ‘OK’ answer could be unreliable for holders of a single-entry or double-entry visa who had already used one of their permitted entries between 12 October 2025 and 9 April 2026, because those uses were not recorded in EES. The EU portal still displayed that wording when we opened the page on 13 October, so you may see it. The date has passed. The caveat is about visa holders, so it does not apply to visa-exempt travellers such as British, American, Canadian and Australian passport holders.

Who is the tool not for?

The automated calculator does not apply to non-EU family members of EU citizens who travel under the free movement directive (Directive 2004/38/EC) and do not hold a residence card. The EES FAQs say they are registered as family members and that the calculator does not run for them. Our guide to the family member exemption explains who counts. The tool page also says it applies only to non-EU nationals travelling for a short stay.

Does my passport chip show how many Schengen days I have left?

No. Your entries and exits are not written to your passport. The EES FAQs describe a biometric passport as one containing “a chip with your biometric information collected from you at the moment you applied for the passport.” EES records go somewhere else: under Article 7 of the EES Regulation, they sit in the EES Central System, which eu-LISA hosts.

At the border the chip is read, not updated. The Schengen Borders Code, as amended for EES, describes the chip check as confirming that its data come from the issuing authority and have not been changed. So there is no day count on the chip for any reader or app to find, and since stamping ended on 10 April 2026, there are normally no stamps to count either.

To see your days, use the EU tool above, ask the passport control officer (the EES data page says you have the right to that information), or use the equipment some border crossings have for the same check.

What if the number looks wrong?

Check your own record first. If an entry or exit is missing or wrong, the EES data page says you can ask for access to your data and for it to be corrected, completed or deleted. Our guide to checking and correcting your EES record sets out the steps. If you overstayed because of something you could not foresee, such as a hospital stay, the same page says credible evidence can get the record amended and your name removed from the overstayer list. The consequences of an overstay are serious enough that it is worth doing.

Where does ETIAS fit in?

It does not change the count. ETIAS is a separate pre-travel authorisation and the official ETIAS website says it is currently not in operation, with the start date to be announced several months before launch. EES measures how long you stay; ETIAS will decide whether you can travel at all. The ETIAS status page tracks the official position.