Sick days and disaster days, and what actually qualifies

TrackedPR records and organises days. It does not determine residency, and nothing on this page is tax or legal advice.

What these exceptions do, and what they do not

They add days to your Puerto Rico count under the presence test, and that is their entire scope. They do not bear on the tax home test or the closer connection test, and they do not excuse anything else about a year.

The medical exception

A day you are outside Puerto Rico to receive qualifying medical treatment, or to accompany a parent, spouse or child receiving it, is still a day of presence in Puerto Rico.

Read that twice, because "sick day" is a badly misleading shorthand for it. The exception is about inpatient care, not about being unwell. Being ill on the mainland — however genuinely, however miserably — is not this.

It covers you, and a parent, spouse or child you are accompanying — not a sibling, not a partner you are not married to, and not a friend.

What does and does not fall inside it:

• ✓Flown to Miami, admitted overnight for surgery, discharged after four days, with two medically necessary days either side.
• ✕A week on the mainland with a bad flu, in bed the whole time, never admitted anywhere.
• ✕A day-surgery procedure on the mainland with no overnight admission, however serious the condition behind it.
• ✓Days accompanying a spouse admitted for inpatient cancer treatment off-island.
• ✕Days accompanying a sibling or an unmarried partner. The exception names a parent, spouse or child.

What to keep, at the time rather than afterwards:

1. The admission and discharge paperwork, which is what establishes the overnight stay.
2. Anything that dates the medically necessary period before or after — a pre-op instruction, a discharge plan with follow-up dates.
3. Your travel record for those days, so the days away and the days of care line up with each other.

The disaster exception

A day you are outside Puerto Rico because you left, or could not return, still counts as a day of presence if it falls in either window below.

1. 1A 14-day window around a declared major disaster. A 14-day period within which a major disaster occurs in Puerto Rico for which FEMA issues a notice of a federal declaration of a major disaster in the Federal Register.
2. 2A mandatory evacuation order covering your home. Any period for which a mandatory evacuation order is in effect for the geographic area in Puerto Rico where your main home is located. This one has no fixed length — it runs as long as the order does.

Two conditions people skip:

1. There has to be a federal declaration, not just a bad storm. A hurricane that damages your neighbourhood but never draws a FEMA major-disaster notice in the Federal Register does not open this window.
2. The mandatory evacuation route is geographic: the order has to cover the area your main home is in, not the island generally.

Where the line falls:

• ✓Left the island ahead of a hurricane that drew a FEMA major-disaster declaration published in the Federal Register, and could not get back for eleven days.
• ✕Left ahead of a serious storm that never produced a federal major-disaster declaration.
• ✓Away for the whole period a mandatory evacuation order covered the area your main home is in.
• ✕Away during an evacuation order that covered a different part of the island than where your main home is.

What to keep:

1. The FEMA declaration number for the event, and its Federal Register notice — this is a public record, so it can be found later, but a file that already holds it is a file nobody has to reconstruct.
2. The evacuation order itself, if that is the route you are relying on, showing the area and the dates it was in effect.
3. Your own travel record: when you left, when you got back, and where you were in between.

What people get wrong

1. 1That “sick day” means a day you were sick. The regulation requires inpatient care with an overnight stay in a hospital or hospice. This is the widest gap on the site between what a phrase suggests and what a rule says, and it is the one most likely to cost someone days they thought they had.
2. 2That a bad hurricane is a disaster day. The window opens on a federal declaration of a major disaster published in the Federal Register — not on the weather, and not on the damage.
3. 3That the 14-day window and an evacuation order are the same thing. They are two separate routes with different lengths: one is a fixed window around the declaration, the other runs exactly as long as the order covering your home area does.
4. 4That the flag is the proof. A day marked in an app is a note that you believe an exception applies. The admission paperwork, or the declaration and the evacuation order, are what anyone would actually be shown.
5. 5That these days help everywhere. They are days of presence for the day count. They do not touch the other two tests.

What TrackedPR does with them

TrackedPR lets you mark a day as a sick day or a disaster day, keeps it as its own kind of day rather than folding it into ordinary presence, and carries that flag into your export so your CPA sees which days rest on an exception and which do not. What it does not do — and what no app can do — is decide whether a given day meets the definitions above. That is the point of keeping the underlying documents beside the flag.

That is why both kinds of day are held separately rather than folded into ordinary presence, and why the distinction survives into your export: a day that rests on an exception is a different kind of claim from a day you were simply here, and a reader of your record should be able to see which is which without asking.

Official sources

Everything stated as a rule on this page comes from one of these. Where our wording and the government's differ, theirs governs.