February 31st, What a Day in the EU and USA!
Defining a day mattered a whole lot as a debt collector, or when you're trying to follow EU rules
What really counts as a day? It’s a simple question, but one with wildly complicated answers, especially if you’re in the legal profession, working as a debt collector, or trying to keep track of travel rules. I’ve had experience with all of the above, and let me tell you, counting days is a nightmare. The definitions change depending on the field, the country, and sometimes even the person you ask. And then there are the nonexistent days, like February 31st, which, believe it or not, actually comes up in some official capacities. But before we get into that, let’s try to define what a day even is.
What is a "Day"?
To a normal person, a day might seem straightforward, but in reality, it can mean all sorts of things:
A Single Calendar Date – March 8th, July 4th, etc. But this changes based on location. March 8th in the morning in Vienna is still March 7th in the evening in Minneapolis. Also the date can bleed over into the next. Example: March 8th per the Austrian Railways (ÖBB) counts as 00:00:00 to 23:59:59 on March 8th, whereas those weirdos at German Railways (Deutsche Bahn) would extend March 8th until 3am on March 9th, or 6am if it’s a weekend or holiday.
A 24-Hour Period from a Given Point – “You have a day to pay me back! It’s 2pm now, have the money here by 2pm tomorrow or else I’m poisoning your pet catfish!” But what counts as a full 24 hours? Does it need to be exact? Is there wiggle room? Will Big Tony really exact his revenge on you in precisely 24 hours, or can you have 17 minutes extra to get him the cash? And did he only threaten one of your catfish, or all of them, with his ambiguous singular/plural? Questions, questions.
A Religious Day – In Judaism and Islam, days are measured from sunset to sunset, but sunset varies widely depending on location, and changes by several minutes each day. Some people look when it’s dark enough to see three stars in the sky, but that can be hard to tell. In the Arctic summer, when the sun doesn’t set for months, special rules apply. Space travel gets even trickier. Also here in Austria we have many Eastern/Greek Orthodox people who celebrate Christmas in January, so I’m not even going to guess how they count days.
A Vague Approximation of Waking Hours – “We spent the whole day at the roller disco!” Well, was that sunup to sundown? Noon to 2am? Who knows. But you smell like beer and cigarettes now. Also that sounds awesome, please invite me next time.
A Business Day – The time when offices are open. But weekends and holidays vary by country and industry. In some places, a business week might be Monday to Friday. Elsewhere, Sunday is a workday. Everyone knocks off a few hours early here in Austria on Fridays, so we have something like 4 2/3 business days per week.
A Legally Defined Portion of a Year – Ever heard of legal time travel? In debt collection and finance, a “year” doesn’t always mean 365 days. Some places say it’s 360 days, dividing it into 12 neat 30-day months and pretending those extra five days don’t exist. Others ignore leap years altogether, treating every year as 365 days; or they cut up that leap year like a pecan pie and make every year 365 1/4 days; or they go with the actual cycle—three years of 365, then one of 366. Sounds harmless? Wait until you have “one year” to pay something off and suddenly realize your jurisdiction meant 360 days, not 365. That’s how you end up catching late fees because someone redefined time.
A Hospitality Day – This is how hotels, boats, and other guest service businesses make an 18-hour stay feel like a full “day.” Confusingly, these are often called “nights.” Book a room at the Mexican Hotel in Spittal, Austria (yes, it's real) from 3pm to 11am, and ay chihuahua, you’ve spent one official hotel night, even if you were only there for 20-odd hours. Or take a 16-hour pleasure cruise from Vienna to Bratislava and back, like we did—bam, that’s one hospitality day on the books. Basically, if you’re getting billed for it, the clock works however they say it does.
A Scientific Day –
Solar Day – The time it takes for the sun to return to the same relative spot in the sky at a given location (about 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds).
Sidereal Day – One rotation of the Earth, measured by distant stars (also 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds, but a few milliseconds off from solar day).
SI-Defined Day – Exactly 86,400 seconds, or 24 hours of 60 minutes each, based on atomic clocks measuring the oscillation of a cesium atom. Pure precision!
If you fly around really fast, time passes more slowly for you than down on Earth. However, the B2 Bomber crawls through the sky at snail speed Zulu Day – Not it’s official name, but an SI day centered on Greenwich Observatory, London, ignoring any legal or political interference with the local exact time (such as Daylight Savings, or if the UK were to change its time zone), and ignoring leap seconds (see below). In my Atmospheric Science undergrad, we had to do everything in Z-Days, which meant adding 6 hours from Minnesota time (or 5 when DST was in effect). Weather stations keep Z-Days in order to have standardized data around the world.
And yes, there are also leap seconds—random extra seconds added to keep atomic clocks in sync with Earth’s rotation. These have no bearing on daily life but can wreak havoc on computers. I suppose with enough leap seconds and imaginary definitions of days we might come face to face with the dinosaurs again?
The Legal Side of Days
Immigration Days
One of my personal headaches is counting days for immigration purposes. Most countries seem to count a day based on any amount of presence. If you set foot past border control, even for one second, that day counts.
Example: You’re on the Pan-American Highway. You exit Mexico at 4am on February 1st, enter Guatemala at 4:10am (now Guatemala counts you as present that day), exit at 8am (still counts), and continue doing this through Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and finally Panama, which you enter at 11:58pm. That’s seven countries that all claim you were present on February 1st.
Side Note: some of my family is from Guatemala. It’s very beautiful. The people are incredibly friendly. It’s cheap. If you speak Spanish it’s very easy to travel around. However the food is terrible. It’s literally the only country I’ve ever been to where I hated the food. You’ve been warned.
These immigration days are a big deal if you’re “Schengen Surfing.” The Schengen Zone (most of Western and Central Europe, and a quasi-part of the EU, although non-EU nations are involved too) considers itself a single immigration entity: you get 90 days out of every 180 in the total zone, not per country. Travelers must carefully plan their exits to non-Schengen territories like the UK or Turkey to stop their Schengen days from piling up. Even if you’ve only spent a few hours passing through a Schengen country and then exiting Schengen again, you’ve used up a whole day.
Example: I jet off from Minneapolis to Paris, landing at 11pm on July 1st, ready for a glorious 90-day Schengen adventure. Spain, Italy, Germany—Europe beckons. I count my stay as follows:
31 days to August 1st
31 more to September 1st (that’s 62)
28 more to September 29th (that makes 90)
Even better, my flight out is at 4am on September 29th, and I clear immigration just seven minutes past midnight. So technically, I only had 88 full days, plus an hour on night one and seven minutes on my way out. I’m safe, right?
Wrong. Turns out, I’ve actually been in Schengen for 91 days. I’ve overstayed my allowance and am now banned from croissants and cobblestone streets for five years. My mistake was counting like a normal human instead of a bureaucrat.
When the EU counts days, they do it inclusively. July 1st and 2nd aren’t just one day apart—they’re two full days. So while I thought “One day from now, I’ll start studying French” meant “tomorrow,” the EU says “Non! That ees today!” And just like that, my baguette privileges are revoked. Time to head back to America and back to the grind. Let’s look at the business days we used when I was working at collections agencies.
Business Days and Debt Collection
In my debt collection jobs, business days were an absolute nightmare. If we said payment was due in five working days and today was April 10th, that never meant April 15th. It meant April 17th, because weekends don’t count, and if a holiday was in there, we had to push it out even further.
In mortgage collections, we used a 360-day year, assuming each month had 30 days, in order to calculate interest and standardize billing. But not all states agree, as mentioned prior. Also when dealing with the public, we always used actual calendar dates. So in our internal system an account might be due on the first day of every payment month, but to the consumer that could be February 1st, March 3rd, April 2nd, etc.
Court hours made things even trickier. As a paralegal, I learned that filing cutoffs were brutal. The courthouse may be open 9 to 5, but filings closed at 4:25pm. A document submitted at 4:24:59 was fine; at 4:25:00, it was too late, and blocked by the electronic system.
But enough about time and being late a day or two. What if a month just grows an extra pair (of days)?
February 31st? Really?
Now for the fun part: how does February 31st actually get used?
Some countries (like the UK and Austria) assign February 30th or 31st as birthdates to refugees and stateless people with unknown birthdates. Why? Because January 1st, the traditional date for birthday-lacking folks, was overused and caused paperwork backlogs. Leap day (February 29th), the next choice, also started to get too crowded. So, officials started assigning February 30th and 31st instead. Legally, these individuals celebrate their birthdays on March 1st. As in, their ID might say “February 30th” or “February 31st,” but they would move into the next age category on March 1st, regardless of which of the two fake dates was theirs, or if it was a leap year or not. Also not a great birthday to choose for a fake ID. Then again, who needs one when you can drink at 16 in Europe?
There is also ample weblore about this or that country declaring February 30th or other nonsense dates to be an official day at some time or another, for various (likely made-up) reasons. Of course countries did invent leap days when shifting calendars, but for every real historical February 30th, there are going to be seven or eight fakes. Like, I doubt that the Crown Prince of Sweden made a double leap day on the calendar so he could spend an extra day with his mistress and not have it count as an absence from the palace. Or that Italy declared it’s illegal to east pasta on February 31st. But who knows? Baskin Robbins claims it has 31 flavors of ice cream, yet clearly doesn’t, so I’m not sure what to believe anymore regarding this number.
Conclusion
So, what is a day? It depends. It might be sunrise to sunset, midnight to midnight, or even a period of legal fiction used by immigration and debt collectors. Sometimes, it's a business day, sometimes a workday, and sometimes, it’s a bizarre bureaucratic creation like February 31st. And we didn’t even get into some even weirder, nitpicking scenarios like crossing a time zone or date line boundary back and forth, or how certain autocratic nations re-invented days and years based on their Dear Ruler’s personal preferences.
So if you're ever worried about counting your days—whether for visas, mortgages, or court deadlines—just know that somewhere, in some government database, someone officially has February 31st as their birthday. And that's somehow the most logical part of all of this.
Now on to February 32nd…
Super interesting!
A great post, thanks! Fun and for me very educational too 🙂