Move to Madeira
How the ninety-day rule counts a scouting trip to Madeira
The short answer
Madeira is inside the Schengen area, so a visa-exempt visitor may stay ninety days in any one-hundred-and-eighty-day period across the whole area rather than per country. The window rolls: each day of stay counts the preceding one hundred and eighty days. Entry and exit days both count. Time under a Portuguese long-stay visa does not.
Maximum short stay in the Schengen area
90 days
For third-country nationals not holding a residence permit or long-stay visa. Counted across the whole area, not per country.
EUR-Lex, European Union · check it · read August 26, 2026The reference period
180 days
Rolling, not fixed: for each day of stay, the preceding 180 days are counted.
EUR-Lex, European Union · check it · read August 26, 2026Nearly everyone who ends up moving to Madeira visits several times first. That is the right instinct and it is the thing that quietly consumes a visitor allowance, because the allowance is not annual, is not per country, and does not reset in January.
This page describes how the counting works for a third-country national who does not hold a Portuguese residence permit or long-stay visa. It is the visitor rule, applied to the specific pattern of repeat reconnaissance trips.
The rule in the terms the Code uses
Article 6.º of the Schengen Borders Code allows third-country nationals without a residence permit or long-stay visa to stay in the Schengen area for no more than 90 days, source: EUR-Lex, European Union, read August 26, 2026 in any 180 days, source: EUR-Lex, European Union, read August 26, 2026.
Two counting rules sit inside that sentence and both matter. The period is rolling: for each day of stay, the preceding 180 days, source: EUR-Lex, European Union, read August 26, 2026 are counted. And the day of entry counts as the first day of stay, with the day of exit counting as the last. An overnight arrival and an early-morning departure are two days, not one.
Rolling is the part that catches people
The common misreading treats the allowance as a budget that refills, either annually or every six months. It does neither. On any given day of presence, the question asked is how many days were spent in the area over the previous 180 days, source: EUR-Lex, European Union, read August 26, 2026, and the answer has to be under the limit on that day and on every other day of the stay.
The practical effect is that days do not expire in a block. They fall out of the window one at a time, exactly 180 days, source: EUR-Lex, European Union, read August 26, 2026 after they were used. A long trip therefore keeps constraining travel for months after it ends, which is not how a calendar-year allowance would behave.
One allowance, the whole area
There is no separate Madeira allowance, no separate Portuguese allowance, and no archipelago exception. A fortnight on the island, a week in Lisbon and ten days in Spain all draw on the same 90 days, source: EUR-Lex, European Union, read August 26, 2026.
This trips up people who plan a Madeira scouting trip around a mainland Portugal trip, or who add a few days in Seville on the way home, as though the island were a separate jurisdiction for these purposes. It is not. Madeira is an outermost region of the European Union and part of Portuguese territory, and the border is checked when entering the area, not when flying between Funchal and Lisbon.
Repeat scouting trips are exactly the pattern that eats it
The advice this site keeps giving is to come in February rather than August, to drive the commute in bad weather, and to come back more than once before committing. That is sound and it is expensive in visitor days.
Three separate two-week visits inside a year is not a large amount of travel by the standards of someone making a life decision, and it is a meaningful share of the allowance once the window is applied honestly, entry and exit days included. Someone also planning a summer holiday elsewhere in the area is running two budgets against one account. The counting has to happen before the flights are booked, not after.
What changes when a long-stay visa arrives
Periods of stay authorised under a residence permit or a long-stay visa are not counted toward the 90 days, source: EUR-Lex, European Union, read August 26, 2026. So once a D visa is issued and the applicant is living here under it, time in Portugal stops consuming the visitor allowance entirely.
Before that point it does consume it. Days spent scouting the island as a visitor are ordinary visitor days, whatever the intention behind them, and an application in progress changes nothing about how they are counted. The D visa itself is applied for at a Portuguese consulate in the country of residence, not from inside Portugal on a visitor stamp, which is the second reason the two things do not overlap.
The passport stamp is being replaced by a database
The Entry/Exit System electronically records entries and exits of non-EU nationals on short stays, replacing systematic passport stamping. It began operating on 12 October 2025 with a progressive rollout across the participating states, and became fully operational on 10 April 2026 once all of them had deployed it at their external borders.
That kills a piece of folklore worth naming: the idea that an unstamped passport means an unrecorded entry. Under EES the record is made in a system rather than in ink, and the arithmetic no longer depends on an officer reaching for a stamp. Anyone who has been counting on ambiguity has lost it.
ETIAS is not running yet, and that date has moved before
The European Travel Information and Authorisation System is a pre-travel authorisation for visa-exempt third-country nationals. It is not yet operating. EU Home Affairs Ministers endorsed a fourth-quarter-2026 launch window in March 2025, but the EU's own ETIAS site no longer publishes any launch window at all: as of this page's own check, it states only that ETIAS “currently not in operation and no applications for travel authorisations are collected at this point,” and that “the European Union will inform about the specific date for the start of ETIAS several months prior to its launch.” No such announcement has been made.
The start date has been postponed several times, which is the honest thing to say about it rather than printing a date and hoping. Nothing on this page depends on ETIAS: it is an authorisation to travel, not an extension of the stay allowance, and it will not change how the 90 days, source: EUR-Lex, European Union, read August 26, 2026 are counted when it does arrive. Check the EU's own ETIAS site before travelling, since no launch window is currently published.
What the rule does not settle
It does not settle tax. Days of presence feed the residence test in article 16.º of the CIRS on their own terms, and a person can be well inside the visitor allowance and still have a Portuguese tax question, or the reverse. The two counts are different counts of the same days, run by different authorities, and the tax one has its own deadline in January.
It also does not apply at all to EU, EEA and Swiss citizens, who have no visitor limit here and for whom the only clock that matters is the three-month registration one. And it is irrelevant to buying: a purchase turns on a tax number rather than on immigration status, so the deed can be signed by someone who has no right to stay for the following month.
Questions people actually ask
Does Madeira have its own 90-day allowance separate from mainland Portugal?
No. Madeira is part of Portuguese territory and inside the Schengen area, so days spent on the island draw on the same allowance as days in Lisbon, Madrid or Paris. There is no island exception, no archipelago quota and no reset when flying between Funchal and the mainland.
Does the day of arrival count as a full day?
Yes, and so does the day of departure. The Schengen Borders Code counts the date of entry as the first day of stay and the date of exit as the last. A trip that arrives late on a Friday and leaves early on the following Sunday costs the allowance more days than the nights spent would suggest.
Does the allowance reset every year?
No. The window is rolling rather than calendar-based. On each day of presence, the preceding one hundred and eighty days are counted, so days fall out of the reckoning individually rather than all at once on 1 January. A long autumn trip continues to constrain travel well into the following spring.
Do scouting days count once a D visa is issued?
Time spent under a long-stay visa or a residence permit is not counted toward the ninety days at all. Days spent here as a visitor before the visa was issued were ordinary visitor days and remain in the count until they roll out of the window. Having an application in progress does not change how earlier visits are counted.
Is ETIAS required to visit Madeira now?
No. ETIAS is not yet operating. EU Home Affairs Ministers endorsed a fourth-quarter-2026 launch window in March 2025, but that window is no longer published on the EU's own ETIAS site, which currently states only that the date will be announced several months before launch and that no date has yet been set. When it does begin it is a pre-travel authorisation, not an extension of the stay allowance.
Where this came from
- EUR-Lex, European Union: Regulation (EU) 2016/399 (Schengen Borders Code), consolidated text. eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/ Read August 26, 2026.
- European Commission, Migration and Home Affairs: Launch date for the Entry/Exit System. home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/news/commission-set-launch-date-entryexit Read August 26, 2026.
- European Commission, Migration and Home Affairs: Revised timeline for EES and ETIAS, endorsed by EU Home Affairs Ministers on 5 March 2025. home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/news/revised-timeline-ees-and-etias-2025- Read September 7, 2026.
- European Commission — Travel Europe / ETIAS: ETIAS official site — current status (no launch window published; client-rendered, read in a browser, not curl). travel-europe.europa.eu/en/etias Read September 8, 2026.