Calculating days of presence

quark35: I've sent in my PR Card renewal application. Although I have frequent trips (almost entirely to the US, all listed and documented), I have well above the 730 day limit in the past five years. On my application, I calculated my days of absence (and thus presence) according to the rules for citizenship (I counted the day of arrival in Canada as a day of presence in Canada but not the day of departure). According to this method of calculation, I have 988 days of presence in Canada in the 4 year and 9 month period since I became a permanent resident. Have I shortchanged myself, though? I stumbled across an explanation that for the PR residency requirement, even part of a day counts as a full day. So now I'm a bit confused. Say (hypothetically) I was absent from January 1, 2013 to January 5, 2013. What would the duration in days of this absence be? Four days? Or three days (as I would have left Canada on the 1st and returned on the 5th, so I would have just been completely outside of Canada on the Jan. 2, 3, and 4)? Sorry if I'm overthinking this, but I greatly enjoy reading all the detailed posts on this forum, and thought that if I could get a well-explained answer, it would definitely be here!

Unlike the citizenship residency requirement, for the PR residency obligation any part of the day spent in Canada counts as a day in Canada. So, yeah, for each overnight trip outside Canada your calculation only gave you credit for either the day you left or the day you returned, but not both, yeah, you "short-changed" your calculation of days by one.

No big deal though. None at all actually. Yeah, probably overthinking it a bit.

Reporting 988 days of presence, the real issue is how credible your reporting is. The number is well over the requirement. So, for the sake of numbers, it's good, and that means good enough for the sake of tabulating purposes. Credibility is a separate consideration.

Other than that, if you are contemplating applying for citizenship in the near future, just remember to be consistent in what you report as to dates. Well, foremost be accurate. If in being accurate that turns out to be different than something you reported in the PR card renewal application process, report what you best determine is accurate and, if that is a minor discrepancy with what you reported for the PR card renewal, probably leave it at that, but if it is significantly different, then you might want to attach a supplemental page with an explanation (correction of mistake made in PR application say).