How to track your residency days (without losing your mind)
14 July 2026 · 4 min read
In short
Record the country you were in at each midnight, every day, in one place — and backfill your history from old calendars, passport stamps and spreadsheets. The biggest mistakes are counting visits instead of midnights, mixing year boundaries (UK tax year vs calendar year), and keeping separate logs per country.
What to record
One data point per day: the country where you were at midnight. That single series answers the UK SRT (183 midnights), Singapore's 183 days, and India's 182/120 days — each test just buckets the same days by a different year boundary.
Common mistakes
- Counting trips, not midnights. A day trip to the UK is usually zero UK days; a late-night arrival is one.
- Mixing year boundaries. The UK year starts 6 April, India's 1 April, Singapore's 1 January. A "days this year" total is meaningless until you say which year.
- Separate logs per country. You end up with gaps and double counting. Keep one log and derive each country's total.
- Leaving it until filing season. Reconstructing 300 midnights from memory in March is how errors happen.
Backfilling your history
Old travel spreadsheets, calendar entries, airline emails and passport stamps will get you most of the way. If you already keep a spreadsheet, TaxDin imports Excel files and Google Sheets directly — it understands several common layouts, merges multiple tabs, and normalizes country names, so years of history import in one go.
Keeping it up to date
Log date ranges as you travel ("14–28 August: Singapore") rather than day by day, track your spouse or partner in the same place, and let the app flag the thresholds. TaxDin does exactly this, free — with side-by-side family comparison, an accountant-ready export, and your data kept private to your family.