The 180-day rule

The rule

No more than 180 days outside the UK in any rolling 12-month period

Applies to

Work, business and talent routes to ILR, and the 10-year long residence route

Does not apply to

The partner route to ILR (but citizenship has its own limits)

Counting

Whole days absent; the days you leave and arrive are not counted

Settlement on the work routes requires five years of continuous residence, and the Immigration Rules define that as not being outside the UK for more than 180 days in any 12-month period. It sounds simple. It is the single biggest reason people who thought they were eligible discover, often at the application stage, that their clock has reset.

How the 180 days are counted

Since 11 January 2018 the rule has used rolling 12-month periods: any period of 12 months during your qualifying years, not calendar years and not the anniversaries of your visa. A caseworker looks at every absence and asks whether, in the 12 months ending on the last day of that absence, you were out for more than 180 days in total. Before 2018 the test was per year of leave, and absences in periods before that date are assessed under the old rule.

A day counts as an absence if you were outside the UK for the whole of it. The day you leave and the day you return are days of presence. A week's holiday from Saturday to the following Saturday is therefore six days, not eight. Short trips to Ireland, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man count as absences, because they are outside the UK, even though you pass no border check.

What happens if you exceed it

You do not lose your visa and you are not in breach of your conditions. But your continuous residence is broken, and the five-year clock restarts from the day you came back after the absence that broke it. If you have been in the UK for four years and a seven-month absence broke the chain in year two, you have two qualifying years, not four.

Exceptions

Absences for the following reasons are disregarded for applications since 2024, and were treated generously before that:

• Travel disruption caused by natural disaster, conflict or pandemic (the COVID-19 period was covered by a specific concession).
• Compelling compassionate circumstances such as the serious illness or death of a close relative.
• Research-related absences for Global Talent, Innovator Founder, Skilled Worker researchers and their partners.
• Absences on Crown service, or accompanying a partner on Crown service.
• For the long residence route, pre-2024 absences assessed under the older 548-day total rule where that is more favourable.

Work trips for your UK employer do not have an exemption on the Skilled Worker route; they count like any other absence. Partners of Skilled Workers have their own 180-day limit when they apply for ILR as dependants.

Routes without the rule

The partner route has no 180-day rule for ILR, though very long absences undermine the claim to be living together. The EU Settlement Scheme uses a different test, six months in any 12 with one longer absence allowed for an important reason. But everybody who later applies for citizenship meets a separate test: no more than 450 days away in the five years before applying and 90 in the final year.

Check your own dates. Our ILR date calculator takes your start date and trips and tests every rolling 12-month window against the 180-day limit, then gives your earliest application date.

Keeping records

The application form asks you to list every absence in the qualifying period with dates and reasons. Since passports are rarely stamped on exit and the UK has no exit record you can request, you need your own log. Keep a spreadsheet from the day you arrive: departure date, return date, country and reason, with the boarding passes or booking confirmations saved. If you have lost track, your email and your bank card transactions abroad will reconstruct most of it. Caseworkers can see entry records from the Home Office's own systems, so an incomplete list that contradicts them is worse than a long one.