The Travel Log

The statute provides that an individual SHALL BE TREATED AS PRESENT in the United States on any day if they are PHYSICALLY PRESENT AT ANY TIME DURING SUCH DAY. There is no half-day and no hour threshold. A morning departure and an evening arrival are each a full day of presence, which means a trip abroad costs the day count two fewer days than most people assume — and the assumption always runs in the direction that under-counts presence.

Because the United States counts any part of a day, and because India's day count likewise treats a day spent in India as a day in India, the date you fly between them is a day of presence in each. A day is not divided between two jurisdictions and handed out in halves — it is counted twice, once by each. Across a decade of annual visits this is not a rounding error: it is two extra days per trip, in both counts, and it runs against the traveller's intuition that a day spent leaving is a day spent nowhere.

The American test counts days DURING THE CALENDAR YEAR — January to December. India's tax year runs April to March. A trip in February therefore falls in one American year and the tail of a different Indian one, and a February-to-April absence is split across an Indian year boundary while sitting entirely inside a single American one. Anybody totalling their days once and applying the total to both tests is answering two questions with one arithmetic, and it is wrong for at least one of them.

Different tests need different things from the same journey. A running total of days abroad answers the American presence question; the length of the LONGEST SINGLE absence answers the returning-resident question and the naturalisation continuity question, and no total can reconstruct it. Which side of a year boundary a trip falls on decides which year it counts in, and for two countries that is two different boundaries. A log recording only how long you were away has already thrown away the answers to three of the tests it was kept for.