How to Track UK Days for the Statutory Residence Test: What Actually Holds Up (2026)

Every SRT position, resident or not, ultimately rests on one dataset: where you were at midnight, every night of the tax year, with your ties documented alongside. HMRC enquiries request exactly this, and they cross-check it against flights, cards and phones. Here is an honest comparison of the ways people keep that record, including where our own app fits, held to the same standard we apply to comparison pieces about others. Updated 5 August 2026.

The spreadsheet

Pros: free, flexible, familiar; fine for simple lives with a handful of trips. Cons: manual entry fails exactly when life gets complicated (the multi-leg month you reconstruct in April); no midnight logic, so border-day errors creep in; and a spreadsheet typed the week before a filing looks like what it is. Contemporaneity is much of the evidential value, and spreadsheets rarely have it.

The calendar-and-diary method

Pros: genuinely contemporaneous if maintained; accepted evidence for decades. Cons: records intentions, not presence (the cancelled trip stays in the calendar); no day-count arithmetic, so your running SRT position is always a manual calculation against the ties bands.

Phone location history

Pros: automatic and independent, which auditors like. Cons: it is a corroboration source, not a record: exports are unwieldy, gaps appear when devices die or settings change, retention policies change outside your control, and it does no SRT arithmetic. Best used to back up a primary log, not to be one.

A dedicated day tracker (ours)

Days Monitor is our app, so treat this as our pitch held to the sourcing rule. It logs days automatically in the background across every country, applies midnight-style day logic, ships a UK template alongside 35 US state rules and Schengen 90/180, lets you set your personal ties-band ceiling as a custom rule with alerts, and exports timestamped PDF/CSV reports. Travel data stays on your device and personal iCloud, never our servers. Honest limits: it is iPhone-only; it counts days and cannot judge your ties for you; and no tracker substitutes for advice on a contested position. It pairs with our free Statutory Residence Test tool for working through the tests themselves.

What an enquiry actually rewards

Whatever method you choose: contemporaneous beats reconstructed; automatic beats remembered; corroborated beats bare. The strongest position is a primary day log kept as you travel, matchable against independent traces, with the arithmetic already done. That is the standard to hold any method to, including ours. Download it on the App Store.

Sources

• HMRC, RDR3: Statutory Residence Test (accessed 5 August 2026)

This article is general information, not legal, tax or immigration advice. Rules change, enforcement varies, and your facts matter. Verify current requirements with the official sources linked above and confirm your position with a qualified professional before acting.