residex.ioEvery trip accounted forTax Residency in France: the 183-Day Question
Days are one of four tests, and any one of them is enough
Four doors, and you only need to walk through one
French law lists four independent tests, and meeting any one makes you resident for tax purposes. Your household (foyer) is in France — where your spouse and children live, even if you work abroad most of the year. Or your principal place of stay is in France. Or you carry on your main professional activity there. Or the centre of your economic interests is there.
The day count belongs to the second test. Case law treats a stay of more than 183 days in a year as making France your principal place of stay, and a shorter stay can still qualify if you spent longer in France than in any other country.
The calendar year
France measures presence over the calendar year. Unlike Spain, it does allow residence to begin or end part-way through a year when you move in or out, so the date of the move matters and is worth recording precisely.
Why the household test catches people
Someone who works in Dubai or Singapore and flies home to a spouse and children in France at weekends may spend far fewer than 183 days there and still be resident under the household test. Nothing in a day count reveals that.
Tax treaties can override the outcome where both countries claim you, using a tie-breaker that looks at your permanent home, centre of vital interests, habitual abode and nationality — in that order.
What residex.io does about it
Residex counts your days in France over the calendar year, arrival and departure days included, warns as you approach 183, and can notify you on the date a planned trip would take you past it.
It has no view on where your household or your economic interests are. Those are the tests that decide most French cases, and they are for an adviser, and for Amanda, not a day counter.
Who needs to watch this
- Cross-border workers with a family home in France
- Retirees splitting the year between France and elsewhere
- Founders with French companies who live abroad
- Anyone counting days as if they were the whole test
Counting days is where this stops
Residex tells you exactly where you stand against this threshold and warns you before you cross it. Crossing it is not a conclusion, though: it does not tell you what you owe, whether a treaty offers relief, which forms to file, or how this interacts with residency you already hold elsewhere.
That is where Amanda picks up — turning a day count into a read on your real cross-border obligations.
Track it automatically
Free forever. No account required. Your data never leaves your device.
How residex.io works
residex.io tracks where you have physically been, and tells you where that puts you against each country's own residency threshold.
What it does: • Counts your days per country, and per area for the Schengen 90/180 rule • Applies each country's actual rule — 183 days for most, 180 for Thailand, the UK's 6 April tax year, Portugal's rolling twelve months, and the US weighted three-year test • Counts days the way each rule counts them, including the arrival and departure days that most tests count and a nights-based tally misses • Warns as you approach a threshold, and can notify you on the date a trip you have already planned would take you across it • Exports to CSV, or hands off to Amanda for the compliance picture
Built for digital nomads, frequent travellers, expats, and anyone whose year is split across borders.
On your device, and nowhere else. There is no account, no login, and no copy of your travel history on our servers — residex works offline because the data never needed to be anywhere else.
It leaves your device only when you decide to send it: • A backup file you save yourself • A transfer to another device, encrypted with a code only you hold — the server relaying it cannot read what it is carrying • A hand-off to Amanda, which you start
We do receive a small amount of anonymous usage information — how many trips are in a log, how old an install is, the language the app is used in, and a random identifier that is not linked to you. Never a trip, a date, a destination, or your name. It is listed in full in our Privacy Policy.
The trade-off worth knowing: because your device holds the only copy, clearing your browser data or deleting the app erases it, and we cannot restore it. Save a backup before you switch devices.
No — residex is a day counter, not a compliance engine. It flags when you cross a threshold like the 183-day rule, but turning that into specific filings, tax exposure, or reporting obligations depends on your jurisdictions and personal ties.
For that, our partner Amanda maps your full cross-border legal exposure across countries, surfaces the filings and deadlines you trigger, and turns the data residex collects into a concrete compliance picture you can hand to your accountant.
You can export your residex trips and import them straight into Amanda — the CSV formats are aligned.