How do yacht crew count their days for the 183 day rules?

Every March a message goes round the crew mess. Someone's accountant has asked for the days. Nobody has them. Then comes a week of scrolling through photos of departure boards and guessing. I am a serving captain and I have watched it happen to good crew for years. This page is the count I wish someone had shown me on my first rotation.

Definition: A full day outside a country is a day on which you were not inside that country at any point, midnight to midnight. The day you leave and the day you arrive are part days. Under most exemption tests, part days do not count.

Which rule are you counting for?

Start here, because the rule defines the day. There is no single count that serves every country. These are the ones that bite yacht crew. I checked each against its primary source on 10 September 2026.

Read the last column twice. South Africa and the United States count the days you were fully out. Schengen counts the days you were partly in. The United Kingdom asks one question: where were you at midnight. You are on three different clocks, and your passport shows none of them.

Why do the travel days go missing?

Take one flight. You leave Cape Town on 3 May and land in Nice on 4 May.

For the South African exemption, both days are part days. Neither counts toward the 183 or the 60. Your block of days outside starts on 5 May.

For Schengen, 4 May is your first day of stay and it counts in full. So does the day you leave, whenever that is.

For the United Kingdom's deduction, 3 May is a day of absence only if you were outside the UK at midnight, and a stamp cannot prove what time your flight left. Watch the other half of that rule too. At every return, your UK days across the whole period must still be no more than half of it.

One flight gives three answers, which is why a season that felt like six months away comes back shorter when the accountant counts it. Each flight costs you two days at the South African count, so a rotation costs four, and a crew member who flies home twice a year has lost eight days before a single day ashore is counted.

From the bridge: The 60 day block is the one that catches rotational crew. Ten weeks on, ten weeks off looks safe until you count the flights. A 70 day rotation is 68 full days outside at best. Lose a day to a delayed connection through Johannesburg and you have 67. Know your number before you book the flight home.

Do the days at sea count?

For South Africa, yes, while you are in employment. A day on passage in the Atlantic is a day outside South Africa. The catch is the employment gate. Days outside South Africa only count while you hold a contract. The three weeks you spent surfing in Bali between boats do not count, however far from home you were.

For the United States, no. The physical presence test wants full days inside a foreign country, and international waters are not a foreign country. A day alongside in Antibes counts. A day 200 miles off Bermuda counts for nothing. An Atlantic crossing can cost a US crew member two weeks of a test that only has 35 days of slack in a year.

For Schengen, it is not settled. Border officers often treat a signed on crew member in a Schengen port as not accruing days of stay, but that is practice and not law. Count them as days of stay, which is the harder reading and the safe one.

How do I keep the record?

Stamps used to be the record, and since April 2026 they are not. Schengen stopped stamping non EU passports on 10 April 2026, when the Entry Exit System went fully live across all 29 countries. The United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand do not stamp arrivals. South Africa, the Caribbean, Turkey and Montenegro still do. On a 2026 rotation, somewhere between a quarter and a third of your crossings leave ink, and the rest leave nothing.

So the record has to be yours, and it has to be kept as you go. One line per flight is enough: the date you left, the country you left, the date you landed, the country you landed in. Log it in the airport. Two lines at the start and end of every rotation is the whole job.

Then count against the rule. If you file in South Africa, count full days outside, and count them only inside contracts. If you hold a non EU passport, run the Schengen 90 in 180 alongside it, because that one is an immigration problem and it does not care what you owe. Keep the two counts separate, because they are not the same days.

Old passports are still worth reading. Every stamp in them is a dated crossing for a year you have not counted yet. Photograph the pages before you hand the passport back at renewal.

The day count in SeaPapers does this on every account. You log a trip as one line, and it counts your crossings against the South African, UK, US and Schengen rules in each rule's own unit. It reads your signed on periods from your sea service ledger, so the employment gate is already answered, and it shows you the days it cannot place rather than guessing. It gives you the count. Your tax practitioner gives you the position.

From the bridge: SARS has not settled whether a yacht is a ship engaged in international transport for reward, which is what section 10(1)(o)(i) wants. The note names cruise ships and cargo ships. A private yacht with no paying passengers almost certainly fails the test. I count for the general exemption and I let the seafarer one be a question for my practitioner. I suggest you do the same.

Do this now

• Write down the date and country of every crossing since 1 March, both ends of each flight.
• Mark which of those days you were under contract. Only those count for the South African exemption.
• Count full days outside South Africa, then find your longest single block. You need more than 183 and more than 60.
• If you travel on a non EU passport, count any part day inside Schengen over the last 180 days. Stay under 90.