UK Standard Visitor Visa (6-month rule)

Key parameters
Limit	6 months
Period / Window	Per visit
Counting	Any part of a day
Additional requirements	No work, no public funds

The permission is granted per visit, not per year. Whether your visa runs for six months or ten years, or you need no visa at all, each entry carries the same 6-month limit. It applies to anyone arriving as a visitor — not to someone already holding leave on a work, study or family route, whose own permission governs instead.

Clearing 6 months isn't enough on its own. You also have to pass the genuine visitor test, which is about intention as much as time:

• You'll leave at the end of your visit.
• You'll stick to permitted activities — tourism, visiting family and friends, business meetings and negotiations, conferences, and certain paid engagements.
• You won't take UK work or settle here. Taking a job, running a business from the UK, most paid work for a UK organisation, claiming public funds and using the route to settle all sit outside what a visit allows.
• You aren't living in the UK through repeat visits. This one has no numeric trigger, so an officer weighs your overall pattern instead.

• A long-term visitor visa grants no extra time per visit. People routinely read a 5-year visa as permission for a longer stay. It isn't. It's permission to keep arriving over five years, still 6 months at a time.
• There is no safe ratio of time in to time out. Advice circulating about "six months in, six months out" has no basis in the rules. What matters is whether your pattern shows you're visiting or effectively living here.
• Visa-free travellers need an Electronic Travel Authorisation. Since February 2026 an airline or ferry operator must refuse to board you without one. An ETA lasts 2 years or until your passport expires, and it changes neither the 6-month limit nor the officer's discretion at the border.
• You can't switch to another route from inside the UK. Being offered a job or a course place during a visit doesn't let you apply from here — you have to leave and apply from your country of residence.
• Recreational study is allowed, but capped at 30 days. A leisure course leading to no formal qualification — pottery, riding, corporate team-building — is a permitted activity for up to 30 days, and those days don't have to run consecutively. English language training is specifically excluded.
• Marrying or forming a civil partnership needs a different visa. A Standard Visitor visa doesn't cover it, whatever length of stay you're granted.

Overstaying makes any further application very hard to win, and the re-entry ban that follows is graded by how you left. It runs to 12 months where you went voluntarily at your own expense, 2 or 5 years where the taxpayer funded your departure, and 10 years where you were removed, deported, or used deception. A Border Force officer can separately turn you round at the airport if your pattern of visits stops looking like visiting, and that refusal then sits on your record. Professional advice is strongly recommended in situations like this.

A straightforward business trip

You come to London for a three-week series of client meetings and negotiations, paid by your employer abroad. Meetings and negotiations are permitted activities, you're well inside 6 months, and your job abroad evidences that you'll leave.

A long-term visa read the wrong way

You hold a 5-year visitor visa and plan a nine-month stay, reasoning the visa covers it. The visa's length governs how long you can keep traveling, not how long each stay can be, so 9 months exceeds the limit, and you'd be overstaying from month seven.

A visit pattern that stops looking like visiting

You spend five and a half months in the UK, leave for three weeks, and return for another long stay, repeating this across two years while your partner lives here. No single visit breaks the 6-month limit, but an officer can conclude you're living in the UK through visits and refuse entry.

• GOV.UK — Standard Visitor visa
• Home Office — Immigration Rules Appendix V (Visitor)
• GOV.UK — Electronic travel authorisation (ETA)
• Home Office — Immigration Rules Appendix Visitor: Permitted Activities