Long-term visa for Schengen for American(s)?

score:7

Accepted answer

Unfortunately, the answer appears to be no. Your best bet is to get the Spanish long-stay visa (or one from another country if you can find one with less red tape) and then spend at least half of your time in that country. In practice, you'll be unlikely to get into trouble if you exceed 90 days in other Schengen countries in a 180-day period, because there's no systematic tracking of internal movements. It would normally become a problem only of you came to the attention of the police for some other reason.

Getting Schengen short-stay visas (type C) from other countries won't help you at all, because the 90/180 rule applies to those visas just as it does to visa-free stays. You could in theory get multiple long-stay visas (for example, if you planned to exceed the 90/180 restriction in both Spain and France), but qualifying for such a visa in more than one country seems unlikely, and even if you could, you would be adding to the bureaucratic burden rather than reducing it.

Another strategy, of course, is to plan a lot of your European travel in the UK (you can stay for up to six months in the UK without a visa, as you may know), Ireland, and the non-Schengen Balkan countries, as well as any other extra-Schengen trips you care to make.

There are also some Schengen countries where you can stay up to 90 days despite having exhausted your Schengen limit, because of bilateral agreements between those countries and the US. Poland and Denmark have such agreements. But beware: your time in those countries does count against your Schengen limit, so once you've exhausted it, you have to leave the Schengen area directly from that country (or fly to another such country). That is, if you spend 90 days in Germany, you can then go to Poland or Denmark for 90 days, but if you spend 90 days in Poland or Denmark, you cannot go to Germany.

So, even if you don't get a long-stay visa, you can probably contrive a one-year itinerary that keeps you within the law, provided you're willing to spend a fair amount of time in

  • Schengen "bilateral agreement" countries

    • Denmark
    • Poland
    • (others?)

  • Non-Schengen countries [EU]

    • UK
    • Ireland
    • Bulgaria
    • Romania
    • Croatia

  • Non-Schengen countries [non-EU]

    • Bosnia and Herzegovina
    • Serbia
    • Montenegro
    • Kosovo
    • Macedonia
    • Albania
    • Turkey
    • Russia
    • Belarus
    • Ukraine
    • Moldova
    • Morocco
    • Others farther afield

More post

Search Posts

Related post