How do I get my UK travel history from the Home Office for ILR or citizenship?

Where your UK travel dates actually are

Nobody stamps a passport at a UK eGate, and most airlines stopped issuing paper boarding passes years ago. The only systematic record of when you entered and left the UK is the one the Home Office builds from carriers' advance passenger information, and you can ask for a copy of it. You cannot look it up online the way US visitors can with the I-94 site; the route is a subject access request under the Data Protection Act 2018.

The same request returns the rest of your immigration file — application dates, decisions, landing cards — which is why immigration advisers file one before almost every ILR or naturalisation application.

What the Home Office can provide

The Subject Access Request Unit (SARU) offers three online request types. All are free.

• Basic.

  An electronic summary of your immigration history, landing cards held electronically, visa applications made from abroad, Workers Registration Scheme data for eligible nationals, and entry and exit records for the past five years — provided you submit the passport or travel document you used for that period. This is the request that answers the travel-history question for most people.

• Specific.

  Up to five named documents — a particular decision letter, an interview record, an appeal outcome.

• Detailed.

  Your full Home Office paper file plus electronic records. Slower, and only worth it when the basic summary leaves a gap you can describe.

The Home Office states that it responds within one month of holding all the documents it needs to verify your identity; the statutory clock allows an extension of up to two further months for complex requests. If you file more than one request for the same person, SARU treats the first as your application and asks you to choose.

How to submit the request

1. 1Open the UKVI subject access request form on GOV.UK (linked in the sources) and choose the basic request unless you know you need specific documents.
2. 2Enter your personal details exactly as they appear on your passport and any Home Office reference numbers you hold — BRP or eVisa (UKVI account) details, Home Office reference, previous application numbers.
3. 3Upload a scan of every passport you have travelled on in the last five years, including expired ones. Travel history is matched to the document, so a missing passport means a missing stretch of history.
4. 4Upload proof of identity and, if you have moved, proof of your current address; the unit will write out for anything missing, and the one-month clock does not start until it has everything.
5. 5If someone is applying on your behalf — a solicitor, a family member — include your signed authority.
6. 6Submit and note the date. There is no tracking portal; do not chase inside the first month.

The response arrives by email as a set of PDFs. The travel history is usually a table of movements with a date, direction (arrival or departure), port and carrier for each recorded crossing.

Why the record is incomplete — and how to fill the gaps

Advisers warn clients that the SAR travel history is rarely the whole story, and the Home Office says as much in its own guidance: the absence list you submit is your responsibility, not the record's. Typical gaps:

• Ireland and the Crown Dependencies. Journeys within the Common Travel Area are not subject to routine immigration control, so trips to Dublin, Jersey or the Isle of Man seldom appear — but they are still absences for Appendix Continuous Residence.
• Ferries, Eurostar, private and small-airport travel. Coverage of non-air and non-scheduled routes is patchier than for airlines.
• Records older than five years, or on a passport you no longer hold and did not upload.
• One-sided entries — a departure with no matching arrival or vice versa, usually a data-capture failure rather than a real gap.

Reconstruct the missing dates from your own sources, in roughly this order of reliability:

1. 1Airline and rail booking confirmations and e-tickets in your email — search by carrier name and by 'booking reference'.
2. 2Bank and card statements: the first foreign transaction and the first UK transaction bracket each trip to within a day.
3. 3Phone location history or photo metadata, which most people have without knowing it.
4. 4Stamps in the passport for the countries you visited — many still stamp on entry even though the UK does not.
5. 5Employer travel records and expense claims for business trips, which also supply the 'reason' column.

Where a date remains uncertain, resolve it against yourself — treat the trip as starting earlier and ending later — and say so in the application. Caseworkers penalise omissions, not candour about a day's uncertainty.

Turning it into an absence table for ILR or citizenship

Both the ILR form and Form AN ask for every absence in the qualifying period, with dates and reasons, and both apply the whole-days-outside-the-UK convention: the day you leave and the day you return are not absences. A working table needs six columns:

• Departure date — from the UK exit record or your own evidence.
• Return date — from the UK arrival record.
• Whole days absent — return minus departure minus one.
• Destination.
• Reason — holiday, work, family; flag anything you will argue is a permitted exception.
• Source — SAR record, e-ticket, card statement — so you can answer a query without starting over.

Sample

• 14 Feb 2025 → 23 Feb 2025 · 8 days · Spain · holiday · SAR + Ryanair confirmation.
• 02 Jun 2025 → 04 Jun 2025 · 1 day · Ireland · work · not in SAR; Aer Lingus e-ticket + card statement.
• 19 Dec 2025 → 06 Jan 2026 · 17 days · India · family · SAR (arrival only) + BA confirmation for departure.

For ILR the total then has to be tested against 180 days in any rolling 12-month period across the whole qualifying period, not per calendar year; for naturalisation the tests are 450 days in five years and 90 in the final year (270 and 90 for spouses of British citizens). The ILR absence calculator and the naturalisation absence calculator apply the conventions to your table and show the earliest date you qualify.

Keeping the history complete from now on

The SAR is a one-off reconstruction. The cheaper approach is never to need it: keep a running log of every trip out of the UK as you take it, with the same six columns, and export it when the form asks. Bounded records border crossings automatically — including the Common Travel Area journeys the Home Office does not — and exports a dated travel report, so the table above already exists when you reach the absences section of the form. File the SAR anyway before you apply, and reconcile the two: agreement between your own record and the Home Office's is the strongest position you can be in.

The wider process — tests, fees, documents — is covered in the ILR guide and what documents do I need for ILR?

Sources

• GOV.UK — Request copies of personal information held in the borders, immigration and citizenship system
• UKVI — Online subject access request form (SARU)
• GOV.UK — Immigration Rules Appendix Continuous Residence
• GOV.UK — Naturalisation as a British citizen: residence requirements (Form AN guidance)