Unlawful Presence Calculator
Unlawful presence math goes wrong more often than lawyers would like to admit. This unlawful presence calculator asks four questions and gives you the countable days, the bar that attaches under INA 212(a)(9)(B), and the earliest date your client may seek admission again. The April 1, 1997 cutoff and the under-18 exclusion are already built in. So is the catch in the three-year bar that most summaries miss.
The day after the authorized stay expired, or the date of entry without admission or parole.
Optional. Supply it and time under 18 is excluded to the day, under 212(a)(9)(B)(iii)(I).
These are the periods the statute excludes from the count, or that take the bar off the table entirely. Leave every box clear if none applied.
What counts, and what does not
The statute sets two thresholds, and they do not work the same way.
- More than 180 days, under a year. Your client is barred for 3 years, but only if they left voluntarily before proceedings began.
- One year or more. Your client is barred for 10 years, and how they left does not matter.
A removal, or a departure after the NTA, falls outside the 3-year bar entirely.
Two rules apply automatically:
- Nothing before April 1, 1997 counts, because IIRIRA did not reach backward.
- Nothing before your client turned 18 counts, so a date of birth moves the start of the count.
A year means a calendar year, not 365 days. January 1 to December 31 of a leap year runs 365 days and still falls short of the line.
Advance parole changed in August 2026
On August 13, 2026 the Board decided Matter of Delcarmen-Lara, 29 I&N Dec. 830, holding that a departure on a grant of advance parole is a departure within section 212(a)(9)(B)(i)(II), and overruling Matter of Arrabally and Yerrabelly, which had governed since 2012.
Travel on advance parole after a year or more of unlawful presence can therefore trigger the ten-year bar and defeat adjustment. The holding is written to subclause (II), so it does not resolve the three-year provision in subclause (I), and the calculator reports that gap instead of filling it. One further trap is worth checking directly: USCIS Policy Manual 7 USCIS-PM B.2 still relied on Arrabally for TPS-authorized travel as of the last review of that chapter.
Where this tool stops and your judgment starts
This calculator runs fixed date arithmetic in your browser. It does not call a language model, it does not predict how an adjudicator will rule, and nothing you type here is transmitted to Drafty AI or stored anywhere.
What it cannot know is the part that decides cases. It does not know whether proceedings had commenced on the date of departure, whether an asylum application was bona fide, whether unauthorized employment defeated the asylum exception or the tolling provision, whether a prior entry was an admission, or the exact dates of any excluded period. Those are determinations you make from the file, and each of them moves the result.
Every threshold above was verified against primary sources on October 6, 2026: 8 U.S.C. 1182(a)(9)(B) and (C), Matter of Rodarte-Roman, 23 I&N Dec. 905, 911 (BIA 2006), and Matter of Delcarmen-Lara, 29 I&N Dec. 830 (BIA 2026). This page is a calculation aid for licensed practitioners. It is not legal advice and it creates no attorney-client relationship.
What the waiver requires
A bar that attaches turns the matter into a problem Drafty AI can help with. The waiver under 212(a)(9)(B)(v) requires extreme hardship to a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident spouse or parent, and the applicant must be the spouse, son, or daughter of a citizen or lawful permanent resident. Hardship to the applicant’s own children does not satisfy the text.
Drafty AI drafts the hardship brief and the supporting package from your matter file, so the research and the writing stay in one place. See how Drafty AI is priced, read how it compares to the tools you already use, or browse recent practice analysis.