Does Your Home Country Count? Four Decisions About Where Home Sits in Your Record

Ask a frequent traveller how many countries they have been to and you will get a number straight away. Ask whether the country they live in is part of that number and most will pause. It is a small question with a surprisingly long reach, because "home" quietly sets three other figures in a travel record: your country total, your days abroad, and what each trip cost in money you actually think in.

This article gives you four decisions to make once and write down. None of them needs an app. A notebook or a spreadsheet will hold them just as well. What matters is that each has one answer, and that the answer stays the same across every year of your record.

Decision 1: Is home in the total?

There are two defensible answers.

Include it. You have stood in that country, you know it better than anywhere, and the question "how many countries have you been to?" is literally true of it. If someone has seen 34 countries including the one they live in, 34 is a correct answer.

Leave it out. The number is meant to describe travel, and you never travelled to the place you already were. On this reading the same person has 33, and the figure measures how far they have gone from where they started.

The mistake is not choosing either one. The mistake is switching. People who count generously at a dinner table and strictly on a profile end up with a number they cannot defend, and comparing with a friend means nothing if one of you has home in and the other has it out.

Our recommendation: home goes in the total, and it never goes in anything labelled "abroad". That gives you one big number that answers the plain question, and a separate figure that does the job people often want the strict count to do. If you prefer to leave it out, that is equally sound. Write the choice at the top of your list, the same way you would write down your rule for what counts as visiting a country.

One wrinkle: your choice of list can change what "home" even is. The Travelers' Century Club, whose list runs to about 330 entries, treats England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as separate destinations, and breaks out Alaska and Hawaii from the rest of the United States. On that list, someone from Glasgow who has never left Britain already has a choice to make about three other entries, and someone in Ohio has two places that feel like home soil yet sit on their own lines. If you use a list like this, decide whether "home" means the single entry you live in or the whole sovereign state.

Decision 2: Which country is home?

This is easy until you move. After that, you need a test, and there are three obvious candidates that give different answers.

Nationality. What your passport says. It is stable and simple, and it is a poor fit for a travel record. A French citizen who has lived in Canada for twenty years does not experience a week in Lyon the way a Canadian does, but they also do not experience it as coming home for good.

Tax residence. Precise, but built for a different purpose. The UK's statutory residence test makes you automatically resident if you spend 183 days or more there in a tax year, though other tests and personal ties can decide it at fewer days. The US substantial presence test also uses the number 183, but it is a weighted calculation across three years, with at least 31 days in the current one. Those rules answer what a government can charge you, and neither was written to describe your life.

Usual environment. This is the one we would borrow. The United Nations' International Recommendations for Tourism Statistics define a visitor as someone on a trip outside their usual environment for less than a year, and describe that environment as the area, not necessarily continuous, where a person carries out their regular life routines. The same document is explicit that country of residence and nationality are different things.

That gives you a practical test: home is the country where your ordinary week happens. Where you work, shop, see a dentist and renew things. A French citizen in Toronto is at home in Canada, and Lyon is a visit. The UN framework also treats a vacation home as outside the usual environment, however often you go, so a flat in Spain does not make Spain home.

Decision 3: What happens when home changes?

Home is a fact with dates attached, and most lists have nowhere to put them. Moving creates three questions, and each has a clean answer.

Does the old home stay in the total? Yes. You lived there, and nothing about moving un-happens it. A country you have lived in is one of the strongest entries on any list. If you keep separate statuses for visited and lived, both former and current homes belong under lived.

Do trips back count as abroad? From the day you moved, yes. Someone who left Poland for Ireland in 2019 was at home in Poland until the move, and has been abroad on every return since, even though it may not feel that way at their mother's kitchen table. The feeling is real, but the record is simpler if the rule is purely about dates.

What about the years before the move? Leave them where they are, and date the change. A single line does the job:

• Poland: home until 14 March 2019
• Ireland: home from 15 March 2019

With that line, your days abroad for any year can be worked out without argument. Without it, you are reconstructing a decision from memory ten years from now, which is exactly the situation good notes you will still understand later are meant to prevent.

Long stays sit in the grey area. A six-month work posting is often not a change of home. It is a long time abroad, and it should fill up that count. A useful threshold, again borrowed from the UN wording, is a year: under a year with a home to return to is a stay; a year or more, or no plan to return, is a move. Apply whichever line you pick the same way each time.

Decision 4: Which money is home money?

The last decision is the one people forget, because it does not look like a geography question. Your home currency is the unit in which your trips can be compared with each other. A week that cost 2,100 euros and a week that cost 310,000 yen tell you nothing side by side until they are both in one currency.

The usual answer is the currency you earn in, since that is the one your sense of "expensive" is calibrated to. It does not need to match your passport, and it does not need to match the country you are in today, if you are paid from somewhere else.

After a move, resist converting the old trips. A 2017 trip recorded in zloty and converted at the rates of the day is a true statement about what that trip cost the person who took it. Reconverting it into euros at today's rate produces a number nobody ever paid. Keep the amounts as they were spent, and if you need a comparison across the move, convert a total once and label it as an estimate. The details of which rate to use are in our guide to exchange rates for travel spending.

Worked example: one person, three numbers

Take a traveller who grew up in Poland, moved to Ireland in 2019, and has visited 21 other countries. Written down, the four decisions look like this:

• Total: includes home. 23 countries: 21 visited, 2 lived.
• Home: usual environment. Poland until 14 March 2019, Ireland since.
• Days abroad: every dated day outside the home of that date, so Christmas in Kraków in 2022 counts and Christmas in Kraków in 2015 does not. The rules for the count itself are in how many days have you spent abroad.
• Money: euro from the move onward, earlier trips left as recorded in zloty.

Four lines. When a friend says they have 25 countries, this traveller can ask the only useful follow-up: does that include home? If the friend leaves it out and this traveller leaves out Ireland, the comparison is 25 against 22, and for the first time it means something.

Putting it in your record

Whatever you keep your list in, put these four lines at the top before you add another country. It takes about five minutes, and it saves you re-arguing the point every time the number comes up.

If you keep your record in MapMyWorld, the same decisions map onto a few settings. Your total includes countries marked visited or lived, so marking your home country as lived puts it in the count, which matches the recommendation above. Home country and home currency are both set in Settings. Set the home country before you read the time-abroad figure, because that figure works by leaving out places in your home country, and with no home set there is nothing to leave out. New expenses are converted into your home currency using the date of the expense. The app holds one current home country rather than a dated history, so if you have moved, the dated line above is still worth keeping in your own notes.

The number on your map is only as good as the rule underneath it. Home is the rule most people never wrote down.