residex.ioEvery trip accounted forHow Long Can a Green Card Holder Stay Outside the US?
Six months draws questions, a year draws a presumption — and the days are counted continuously
The rule is about intent, and absence is the evidence
A green card is permission to live in the United States permanently, and the condition is that you actually do. There is no fixed number of days abroad that ends it. What a long absence does is raise the question of whether you have abandoned your US residence — and the longer the absence, the harder that question is to answer.
Two points matter in practice. After more than six months away, an officer at the border can treat you as seeking admission and ask you to show that the US is still your home. After a year or more away, absent a re-entry permit, the card itself is no longer a valid document for re-entry and residence is presumed abandoned.
What a re-entry permit changes
A re-entry permit, applied for while you are in the US, lets you stay abroad for up to two years without the year-long absence counting against you on its own. It does not prove you kept your residence — ties still matter — but it removes the presumption. Someone who knows a long absence is coming applies before leaving, not after.
Without one, the route back after a year is a returning-resident visa, which requires showing the absence was beyond your control.
Naturalisation has its own clock
If you intend to apply for citizenship, the same absences count again under different rules. Continuous residence for naturalisation is presumed broken by an absence of more than six months, and is broken outright by one of a year or more. And physical presence — at least half the qualifying period spent inside the US — is a separate count entirely. A green card holder can keep the card and still reset the citizenship clock.
What residex.io does about it
Once you record a US permanent residence in Settings, Residex measures the length of your current continuous absence from the US, flags it at 180 days and again as it reaches a year, and can notify you on the date a planned trip would take you past either point.
It does not know whether you hold a re-entry permit, where your home and family are, or how an officer would read your ties. The signal is a prompt to look at those, not a finding.
Who needs to watch this
- Green card holders working or caring for family abroad
- Anyone planning an absence of more than a few months
- Permanent residents who intend to naturalise
- People who assumed a short trip back resets the count
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.