The members of 180 Days in Spain, a Facebook group campaigning to change the 90/180 day rule that limits the stays of British citizens in Europe post-Brexit, are tying themselves in knots trying to work out when they can use their holiday homes.
“We upgraded from an apartment to a villa in 2019, intending to spend two months in Spain and two months in the UK on a rolling format,” says Jane Renshaw, 54, who has owned a home on the southern Costa Blanca for 16 years. “But even though we aren’t going over our 180 days [in the Schengen zone in a single year], the new rules don’t allow for this.”
The 90/180 day rule refers to a waiver that means British citizens do not need to apply for a Schengen visa to visit the area, which comprises 26 European countries, for 90 days in a 180-day period. However, it restricts stays in all Schengen countries to a total of three months in a six-month period, which was not the case before Britain left the EU.
Renshaw is number-crunching to work out whether she can spend 50 days there this summer. Adding to her uncertainty, she sold her house in Nottinghamshire just before she flew to Spain in January and hasn’t yet found anywhere else to live. “So we have a house in Spain that we can’t stay in, and we’re homeless in the UK. It’s madness, and so confusing — 180 days out of 360 would be so much easier,” she says.
Another member of the group, Phillip Everett, a retired actuary from Bristol who has a home in Los Alcazares in the Murcia region, explains that 60 days abroad then 60 days at home in the UK simply doesn’t work. “On day 31 of your second 60-day stay, you will have exceeded 90 days in the past 180 days,” he says.
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Covid travel restrictions have confused matters further, muddying the waters around the Schengen visa waiver rules, which came in in January last year. “Many people haven’t realised just how restrictive the post-Brexit rules are — especially because for European citizens coming to the UK they are the same as before,” says Ann Alexander, who runs the 180 Days in Italy Facebook group.
The 180-day allowance keeps rolling, so you need to count backwards to work out how long you have spent in the Schengen area. “People need to mentally imagine themselves on the day in the future when they exit the Schengen zone, and from that date look back 180 days,” says Mark Leigh, 65, a retired chartered engineer who has owned his home near Alicante since 2015.
His primary concern is no longer being able to help his 95-year-old father-in-law, who has lived on the Costa Blanca for 35 years. “He needs a lot of help, which previously we could provide for extended periods. Now, with 90/180, we have no leeway nor forgiveness for overstays on compassionate grounds,” Leigh explains.
There are websites and apps that can help you to calculate your stay in Europe, including the Schengen Stay Planner app. Spreadsheets of varying complexity are doing the rounds too. “Some don’t support multiple trips in the same household, such as a husband and wife on different timelines,” points out Leigh, who has come up with the “Simple Schengen Calculator” spreadsheet on Excel, which he has shared with the 180 Days in Spain group.
From rock climbers to the retired, few people are finding that this one-size-fits-all rule works for them. “For the past eight years, we’ve spent most of the winter in our motorhome touring the best climbing areas in southern Europe,” says Dominic Oughton, a part-retired innovation consultant in his mid-fifties from the Peak District. “This rule has greatly affected caravan and motorhome ‘winter visitors’ who typically migrate south in autumn and return home in spring.” Oughton travels under the French temporary long-stay (VLS-T) visa, which allows a 180-day visit.
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There are many retired people like Stella Fox, who can no longer stay in her villa near Alicante as often as she used to. “If we’d had private medical insurance in 2020 we could have got Spanish residency. But we missed the deadline and now we have to leave our lovely home empty for long periods at a time,” says Fox, 73, from Kingston upon Thames, southwest London.
The retirement market has been hardest hit by the new limits on time spent overseas, says Jo Leverett, the head of international sales at Cluttons estate agency, but for the average working family 90 in 180 days is more than enough. “If you have a UK-based job and a family it’s hard for you to go over the days,” she says. “Also, some companies are prohibiting their employees from working abroad, mostly due to tax liabilities.”
It’s possible to buy more flexibility. Geoff Robertson, a London-based lawyer, has bought a three-bedroom flat for €750,000 in the Parque das Nacoes area of Lisbon, Portugal, through Cluttons to get a “golden visa” that allows freedom of travel in the EU. He intends to rent out the flat, then he will be allowed to use the villa he bought in the Algarve 25 years ago for €1.5 million whenever he wants. “It is incredibly frustrating, but it is what it is,” says Robertson, 61. “The golden visa process has been fairly straightforward, and I’m pretty confident the Lisbon property is a good investment too.”
In Portugal, “in certain parts, you can secure a golden visa on an investment property for as little as €280,000,” Leverett says. Even in the Algarve, most of which no longer qualifies for golden visa investment, buyers are choosing resorts with tourist licences that provide a visa opportunity and a guaranteed rental return for the first five years. “In some cases they are buying as an investment that will get them a visa so they can use another property they have in Portugal,” says Joao Costa, a sales director at Ombria, a rural resort where the minimum purchase price for a golden visa is €400,000 (unmortgaged) rather than the usual €500,000.
Where a golden visa is beyond budget, buyers are getting creative. Some have applied for Irish passports, “and if you are a UK spouse of an Irish passport holder, you can stay over the 90/180 rule with them, as long as you do not travel alone in the Schengen area,” Leverett says. “In Austria and Germany they have been giving passports to descendants of people who had to flee the countries during the Second World War.”
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If you don’t qualify for an EU country passport, you’re stuck with careful counting. “People can still spend all year in Spain, with the right money and a visa. But part-year residents can’t use their home in the same way they did before Brexit for up to six months a year without it impacting the time they can spend elsewhere in Europe,” Hesselden says.
There is hope, however. The 90 in 180 days stipulation is not a “rule” as such, but a “special permission” granted to certain countries, including the UK, that don’t have an arrangement with the country concerned, Hesselden says. “There’s nothing in the Schengen agreement to stop an official from Spain standing in the airport and handing out visas on arrival for free to UK passport holders, so I think this is easier to fix than people realise. But politicians need to want to do this.”
