One in six EU entry refusals in 2025 involved the 90-day limit

What happened

New analysis of Eurostat figures looks at how many people were refused entry because of the Schengen 90/180 rule. According to SchengenVisaInfo.com, border guards at the EU's external borders refused entry to 22,455 people in 2025 because they had already used up their 90-day allowance.

That was 16.9% of all 132,600 refusals, roughly one in six. It made the 90-day limit the second most common reason for refusal, behind doubts about the purpose of the trip, which accounted for 40,185 refusals.

Refusals under this reason rose from 18,530 in 2018 to a peak of 22,590 in 2024, then dipped by 135 last year. Their share of the total grew much faster, because refusals for other reasons fell sharply after 2019.

The publisher also gives some context on who is affected. Ukrainians accounted for 54.3% of these refusals in 2025, and by reporting country Poland issued 12,120 of them, followed by Romania (2,235), Croatia (2,010) and Italy (1,240). The publisher stresses that none of these figures is a refusal rate: Eurostat counts the people refused, not the people checked. Eurostat also rounds its figures to 5.

What it means for the reader

According to the article, travellers without a residence permit or long-stay visa can spend at most 90 days in the Schengen Area in any rolling 180-day period. The Schengen Borders Code counts both the day you arrive and the day you leave as days of stay.

The limit is shared across every Schengen country. Ten days in Italy and ten days in Croatia are twenty days on the same clock. The article says a border guard who finds that you have no days left can refuse you entry, even if your passport and visa are valid and your trip is perfectly ordinary.

Because the window rolls, the days that matter are the 180 days before each day of your planned stay. The publisher's opening advice is to keep track of how many days you have spent in Europe over the past six months.

These figures describe what happened to others in 2025. They say nothing about any individual trip, and this article cannot tell you what will happen at a border.

Where Staymark fits

Staymark counts one trip log three ways: Schengen 90/180, the UK Statutory Residence Test and US substantial presence. You can read the Schengen figure alongside the other two from the same log.