UK ILR absence checker

The two mistakes this exists to catch

Counting days abroad looks like arithmetic anybody can do in a spreadsheet, and the two ways it goes wrong pull in opposite directions.

Counting the travel days. The guidance is explicit that only whole days count and that part-day absences of under 24 hours are not counted. You were in the UK for part of the day you flew out and part of the day you came home, so neither is a whole day abroad. Out on the 1st and back on the 10th is 8 days. Counting 9 or 10 adds one or two days per trip, and across twenty trips that is up to forty days that were never real.

Counting by year instead of by window. This one is worse, because it produces a comfortable answer that is not true. For permission granted on or after 11 January 2018 the 12-month periods roll: a caseworker may take any 12-month slice of the qualifying period at all.

So 150 days abroad between July and November, and another 150 between January and June, passes both calendar years and fails the window that contains them by 120 days. A spreadsheet with a column per year will never show it. This page checks every possible window and reports the worst one, with its dates, so the number can be checked by hand.

Every window, without checking infinitely many

There are infinitely many 12-month windows in a five-year period, which sounds like a problem and is not.

The total inside a sliding window only changes when one of its edges crosses the start or the end of an absence. Between those moments the number is flat. So the worst window can always be slid along until its start sits on the first day of some absence, or its end sits on the last day of one, and there are only as many of those as you have trips.

Checking that handful gives the exact maximum rather than a sample, which matters because a tool that checked, say, each month-start would miss a window by a few days and report a pass where there was none.

The qualifying period is still five years

This is worth being careful about in 2026, because a lot of what is written about it is ahead of the facts.

The government has proposed raising the standard qualifying period for settlement from five years to ten, under the name earned settlement, with reductions for higher earners and additions in other cases. At the point this page was last checked it remained a proposal: no Immigration Rules introducing a ten-year baseline had been laid, and the standard period was still five years for most routes.

One related change has been made rather than proposed: a Statement of Changes in March 2026 raised the English language requirement for several settlement routes to CEFR level B2, commencing 26 March 2027.

So the qualifying period here is a field with five years in it. Writing ten into the page because a change was announced would make it wrong for everybody using it today, which is the opposite of the mistake it looks like. Check the date beside the guidance link, and check the rules yourself if it has been a while.

What this cannot do

It cannot tell you whether you qualify. It applies one rule: whole days out of the UK, against a limit. Settlement also has an English language requirement, the Life in the UK test, salary thresholds on some routes, rules about gaps in permission, and the specific requirements of whichever route you are on. A clean count here is one requirement of several.

It cannot judge an exception. The guidance lists grounds on which an absence may not count: serious or compelling reasons such as a serious illness, a conflict or natural disaster that prevented return, and on some routes time spent overseas for a UK employer. None of them is automatic and none is a checkbox here, because each needs a caseworker to accept it on the evidence.

It is not advice. If a window comes out over the limit, or close enough that a forgotten weekend would push it over, that is the point to take your dates to a qualified immigration adviser. An application refused on absences is expensive in a way that an hour of somebody’s time is not.

Your dates stay in this tab. There is no request in this page that could send them anywhere, nothing is stored, and it works with the network off. That also means nothing is remembered between visits.