How to count your days in India for residency

Is this you? This guide turns your travel into a day count. It doesn't say which residency test applies to you or what your status then means — for that, run your total through the residency status checker. Already resident and wondering about RNOR? See RNOR status after returning.

Why the day count decides almost everything

Nearly every route to Indian residency is, at bottom, a count of days. The plain 182 days test, the second test that combines 60 days this year with your travel over 4 years, the higher 120 days version for visitors with more Indian income, and both routes to RNOR built on the years you lived abroad — all of them turn on a number you build yourself from your own travel, not one the department hands you.

Get that number wrong and you can end up on the wrong side of whether India treats you as a non-resident (NRI), RNOR or a full resident, which decides whether India can tax only your Indian income or everything you earn worldwide.

This guide uses tax year 2026-27 throughout (what used to be called FY 2026-27, AY 2027-28 under the old Act) 2025 Act s. 3was s. 3. Every day test runs on days between 1 April and 31 March, so a trip that straddles the year-end gets split across two tax years, each with its own count.

Which days count

The Act’s own wording is “is in India for a total period of… days” and “in India cumulatively for… days” 2025 Act s. 6(2)-(5)was s. 6(1). It never says how a day itself is counted — whole calendar days, any part of a day, or something else — and that silence is exactly why the next point is a genuine grey area, not just something nobody’s researched yet.

Arrival and departure days

Whether the day you land and the day you leave both count as full days of stay is unsettled. A 2009 guide for overseas Indians published on the Ministry of External Affairs site, citing an Authority for Advance Rulings ruling (In re P. No. 7 of 1995, (1997) 225 ITR 462), says both the day of arrival and the day of departure count as days of stay in India, so a two-day trip counts as two days, not one. Against that, the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal in Bangalore (Manoj Kumar Reddy v. ITO, (2009) 34 SOT 180) left out the day of arrival, applying the General Clauses Act rule that the first day of a period isn’t counted. That reading turns the same two-day trip into a single day. An advance ruling binds only the person who asked for it, a Tribunal order doesn’t bind other benches, and no CBDT circular settles the point either way.

This guide counts both the arrival and departure day of every trip as a full day in India — the cautious reading, since it doesn’t risk under-counting if you’re close to a threshold. If your own count is within a day or two of a threshold either way, that’s exactly when this grey area can decide your status, and worth a CA’s opinion rather than picking whichever reading is convenient.

Passing through an airport without clearing immigration

No provision of the Act, rule or CBDT circular deals with airport transit. The day tests ask whether you were physically in India, and the Act’s definition of India covers its land and the airspace above it. It says nothing about immigration. An international transit area at an Indian airport is on Indian soil, so on a literal reading a transit stop is a day in India even if you never clear immigration. Some advisers treat a passenger who never clears immigration as not having entered India, but no ruling or circular backs that, so don’t rely on it if that day would take you over a threshold. Keep both boarding passes either way, since a passport that was never stamped won’t show the stop.

Territorial waters, and being on an Indian ship or aircraft

Territorial waters are settled. The Act defines “India” to include its territorial waters, the seabed and subsoil beneath them, the continental shelf, the exclusive economic zone and other maritime zones, and the airspace above its land and territorial waters. Being in India’s territorial waters counts as a day in India, the same as standing on land, and the advance ruling above says so too. Further out it’s less clear. The definition names the continental shelf and exclusive economic zone, but whether time aboard a vessel out there counts as a day in India for these tests hasn’t been settled, so get advice if it matters to you. What doesn’t count is simply being aboard a ship or aircraft registered in India once it’s outside India’s waters and airspace. The test is where you physically are, not what flag the vessel flies.

Adding up several trips in one tax year

Every day test counts your cumulative days in India across the whole tax year, not the length of any one trip. If you came back three times between April and March, you add the days from all three, including a short weekend trip you might be tempted to leave out. There’s no rule that only counts the “main” trip or ignores anything under a certain length — a single day on a stopover to see family counts exactly like a day in the middle of a six-week stay. Where this catches people out is a trip that straddles the tax year-end: a stay from, say, 25 March to 5 April splits into a handful of days in one tax year and the rest in the next, each counted separately toward that year’s own tests.

The lookback totals

The second test doesn’t stop at this year. It needs 60 days or more this tax year and 365 days or more in India cumulatively over the 4 tax years immediately before it 2025 Act s. 6(2)-(5)was s. 6(1). Both halves have to be true; falling short on either one means the second test isn’t met, whatever the other half looks like.

That test mostly doesn’t reach a citizen or person of Indian origin who’s simply visiting from abroad, rather than moving back: for them the 60 days test doesn’t apply at all, and only the 182 days test can make them resident, unless their Indian income is above ₹15 lakh, when 120 days replaces the 60 days. See the 120-day rule for higher-income visitors for how that substitution works and who it actually catches.

Once you’re resident, a separate pair of lookbacks decides whether you’re ordinarily resident or just not ordinarily resident (RNOR) 2025 Act s. 6(13)was s. 6(6): you qualify if you were a non-resident in 9 or more of the previous 10 tax years, or if you spent 729 days or fewer in India over the previous 7 tax years. Either one is enough on its own. These are genuinely separate windows from the second test’s four-year lookback above, and from each other — a common mistake is treating “the last few years” as one blurred figure instead of three distinct counts, each with its own length and its own threshold.

If your own numbers put you into RNOR, the RNOR window planner works out roughly how many years of it your travel history is likely to give you.

Once you know you’re RNOR rather than ordinarily resident, RNOR status after returning covers what that status actually shields and for how long.

One rule doesn’t use a day count at all: a citizen with Indian income above the same threshold who isn’t liable to tax in any other country by reason of domicile, residence or similar criteria can be a deemed resident whatever their days in India. It’s a separate gate from everything on this page, worth knowing about even though counting days won’t help you here.

Ship’s crew and the Continuous Discharge Certificate rule

Two different rules apply to crew, and it’s easy to mix them up. A citizen who’s a crew member of an Indian ship and leaves India in the tax year is simply taken out of the second test altogether — only the 182 days test can make them resident that year 2025 Act s. 6(2)-(5)was s. 6(1).

The other rule changes the day count itself, for a citizen crew member of any foreign-bound ship, not only an Indian one. Section 6(6) of the 2025 Act (was Explanation 2 to s.6(1) of the old Act) leaves the method to the Income-tax Rules. Rule 8 of the Income-tax Rules, 2026 (was rule 126 of the 1962 Rules) sets it: for an eligible voyage, the period from the joining date to the sign-off date entered in the seafarer’s Continuous Discharge Certificate doesn’t count as days in India. An eligible voyage is one by a ship carrying passengers or freight in international traffic that starts at an Indian port and ends at a foreign one, or starts at a foreign port and ends at an Indian one. A voyage between two Indian ports, or between two foreign ports, doesn’t qualify. The evidence is specific: the dates entered in the Continuous Discharge Certificate for that voyage, not a passport stamp or a general estimate of time at sea.

Records to keep, and rebuilding your count

Dates stamped in your passport are normally treated as proof of when you arrived and left, though that’s a matter of practice rather than something the Act itself sets out as the required evidence. Keep the passport itself, and don’t assume a lost or expired one is a dead end: airline boarding passes, e-visa or e-arrival confirmations, and an employer’s travel records can all help rebuild a trip that left no physical stamp.

For an official record of your own travel history, the Bureau of Immigration runs an e-FRRO service (indianfrro.gov.in) that lets you request your own entry-exit data directly. The request includes a document check at your local FRRO office, in person or through an authorised representative if you’re abroad, so start it well before you need the record. It’s the kind of record that settles a dispute over a specific day far more cleanly than a memory of when a trip happened. Whatever the source, reconcile your records twice: once for this tax year’s own count, and again for whichever lookback window above actually applies to your situation.

Worked example across three trips

Karthik lives in Doha, Qatar, and comes back to India three times in tax year 2026-27: once for his parents’ anniversary, once combining work with Diwali, and once at the end of the year to sort out some paperwork. Counting both the arrival and departure day of every trip — the cautious reading above — his three trips add up like this:

Ninety-five days clears the 60 days figure on its own, but that’s beside the point for Karthik: because he’s a citizen simply visiting India rather than moving back, and his Indian income sits under ₹15 lakh, the second test doesn’t apply to him at all. Only the 182 days test could make him resident, and 95 days is well short of it. He stays an NRI this year, regardless of how many years he has behind him or how the arrival-day grey area is read.

The four-year lookback doesn’t matter to Karthik at his current numbers. Even if his Indian income crossed ₹15 lakh, the second test would then need 120 days this year instead of 60 days, and his 95 days fall short of that. The lookback decides the case for someone who has moved back to live in India during the year (the visitor exemption doesn’t cover them) with 60 days or more this year, or for a higher-income visitor with 120 days or more. To see how close that lookback can run, and how much the arrival-day grey area alone can move it, take someone like that who made one trip to India in each of the four tax years before the one in question:

Counting both ends of every trip, that traveller reaches exactly 365 days and meets the lookback. Leave out the arrival day of each year’s trip and the total falls to 361, under the line. With several trips a year the gap is wider, since the Tribunal reading drops a day for every trip. The trips themselves don’t change; only which grey-area reading you use does, and at a margin this tight it’s the difference between meeting the second test and missing it entirely.