Schengen Area
The short-stay visa, and the only refusal list you can actually read.
On the UK route the reasons are inferred. On the US route they collapse into one presumption. Here they are enumerated in the legislation, and the refusal form ticks one of them.
What makes this route different
Every visitor route in the world asks the same underlying question: are you going to leave. What differs is how much of the answer is written down.
The UK publishes Appendix V and leaves a caseworker to weigh it. The United States compresses everything into a single statutory presumption that you intend to immigrate. The Schengen short-stay visa is the only one of the three where the grounds of refusal are listed in the legislation, at Article 32(1) of the Visa Code, and where the refusal itself arrives on a standard form with the ground indicated against a numbered list.
That changes what preparation means. You are not guessing at what a decision maker cares about. You are answering a published list.
If you have already been refused, the form you were given names the ground. What that form tells you, and the appeal right behind it works through Article 32 and what to do with the box they marked.
The four things the file has to show
Article 14(1) sets out what a consulate expects to see, and it is worth reading as four separate jobs rather than as a pile of paper:
- Documents indicating the purpose of the journey.
- Documents relating to accommodation, or proof of the means to pay for it.
- Sufficient means of subsistence for the duration of the stay and for the return.
- Information enabling an assessment of your intention to leave before the visa expires.
Article 21 then describes what the consulate does with it: verify the entry conditions, assess the risk of irregular immigration and to security, and form a view on whether you intend to leave. The fourth item is the one applicants most often leave to be inferred, and it is named in the legislation as something to be assessed.
The requirement that fails an otherwise strong file
Article 15 requires travel medical insurance of at least EUR 30,000, valid across the member states for the whole intended stay, covering repatriation and emergency medical treatment. Article 32(1)(a) then makes its absence a ground of refusal in its own right.
Nothing on the UK or US routes works like this. There is no single document over there whose absence decides the outcome. Here there is one, it is usually the cheapest item in the file, and a policy attached to a flight booking commonly fails at least one of the four conditions above.
The arithmetic nobody does carefully
A short-stay visa allows 90 days in any 180. The window rolls: on each day of your intended stay, the previous 180 days are looked at and the total cannot pass 90. Days from an earlier trip inside that window still count, and your entry and exit stamps are the record.
This is the one place in this whole product where a rule is arithmetic rather than judgement, which is why the check asks how many days you have already spent and compares that against the trip you describe. Somebody who travels to Europe twice a year gets this wrong far more often than a first-time applicant, because they are counting visas instead of days.
Both of those have a guide of their own: the four insurance conditions and how to count 90 in 180 properly.
Where you apply is a rule, not a preference
Article 5(1) gives competence to the member state whose territory is
the main destination of the visit(s) in terms of the length or purpose of stay
Length or purpose. Both, and the second half is the one people skip. Three nights in Munich for the trade fair you actually travelled for can outweigh ten nights driving around Italy afterwards. Counting nights is the usual approach and it is only half the rule.
Only where no main destination can be determined at all does competence fall to the member state whose external border you intend to cross first. That is a fallback for a genuinely undifferentiated trip rather than a tie-break for a close one.
Separately, Article 6 decides which consulate of that state: the one in whose jurisdiction you legally reside. So a Pakistani national living in Dubai applies to the competent state’s mission in the UAE, not in Pakistan.
A strong application lodged with a member state that has no competence to decide it can be rejected as inadmissible before anybody reads the substance. For a single-country trip none of this matters. For a two-week tour of four countries it is worth settling before booking anything.
How this compares to the other two routes
If you are weighing up more than one destination, the tests genuinely differ. The UK Standard Visitor route is a bundle read by a caseworker against the genuine visitor requirement. The US B-1/B-2 route is a conversation of a few minutes in which you carry the burden of displacing a statutory presumption. Schengen is a submitted file assessed against a published list.
The evidence overlaps heavily, so work done for one is rarely wasted. What does not transfer is the shape: a folder assembled for a UK application answers questions a US officer will never open it to ask, and a Schengen file needs an insurance certificate neither of the others requires at all.
How we weight it
These percentages are ours, not the Commission’s. No consulate scores applications out of 100 and none publishes a weighting. What is published here, unusually, is the list of grounds itself, so these factors map onto Article 32 more directly than our other two routes map onto anything. The numbers beside them are still our reading of the emphasis, and a different reader could reasonably choose differently. We publish them because a number you can argue with beats one you cannot see.
Intention to leave
24%Article 14(1)(d) requires information enabling an assessment of your intention to leave the territory before the visa expires, and Article 32(1)(b) permits refusal where there are reasonable doubts about that intention. Employment, property, dependants and business commitments are what that assessment is made from. It is the heaviest factor here, as it is on every visitor route, but unlike the others it is named in the legislation as a thing to be assessed rather than inferred.
Means of subsistence
18%Article 14(1)(c) requires evidence of sufficient means for the duration of the stay and for the return, and Article 32(1)(a) makes the absence of it a ground of refusal. Unlike the UK and US routes there often is a published figure here, because member states set their own daily reference amounts, and they differ by destination.
Purpose and conditions of stay
15%Article 32(1)(a) permits refusal where the applicant does not provide justification for the purpose and conditions of the intended stay. That is two things, not one: why you are going, and the practical shape of the visit. Accommodation for the whole period and a coherent itinerary are the conditions half, and they are checked arithmetically against your dates.
Immigration history
14%Previous compliance is documentary here in a way it is not elsewhere, because entry and exit stamps evidence it directly. Exceeding ninety days in any one hundred and eighty is itself a ground of refusal under Article 32(1)(a), and an alert in the Schengen Information System is another. A previous refusal is recorded and visible.
Information consistency
13%Article 32(1)(b) permits refusal where there are reasonable doubts as to the authenticity of the supporting documents or the veracity of their contents, or the reliability of the applicant's statements. A file whose own figures disagree invites exactly that doubt, whichever version is correct. This dimension is scored from cross-checks between your own answers rather than from any single question.
Documentation readiness
10%Weighted higher than on the US route and for a plain reason: this is a submitted file rather than an interview, so a document you cannot produce is simply absent from the assessment. Article 15 also makes travel medical insurance of at least EUR 30,000 a condition, and its absence a ground of refusal on its own.
Travel record
6%A record of previous Schengen visas used properly is the single most useful item a returning applicant holds, and it is the basis on which longer multiple-entry validity is normally considered. Weighted modestly because a first-time applicant with strong ties is in a perfectly ordinary position on this route.
100 points across 7 factors, enforced in code. A rule pack whose weights do not total 100 fails the build. The methodology page explains the ceilings and the cross-checks that apply to every route.
What the assessment covers
37 questions across 7 sections, with 7 cross-checks comparing your own answers against each other, and a catalogue of 32 documents narrowed to your circumstances. Free, and your answers never leave your browser.
Certain answers cap the reading regardless of the points. Exceeding the 90 days available in the current window, an alert in the Schengen Information System, and an application previously found to contain false information each cap it at red, because those are enumerated grounds rather than matters of degree. Missing insurance caps it at amber, which is the honest position: it is a refusal ground, and it is also the easiest thing in the file to fix.
If your passport is on the visa-exempt list, or you are an EU, EEA or Swiss national, the check says so at the first question rather than taking you through the rest of it.
Where these criteria come from
Quoted from the consolidated text of 2 February 2020, which is the Visa Code as amended by Regulation (EU) 2019/1155. The 2009 original is superseded in several of the provisions above, and quoting it is the commonest error in third-party guidance on this route.
Common questions
What are the grounds for refusing a Schengen visa?
Do I really need travel medical insurance?
How does the 90 days in 180 rule work?
Which country do I apply to?
How long does a decision take?
Do I need a Schengen visa at all?
Is a refusal a ban?
How much money do I need?
An educational estimate based on published criteria. Not a prediction, and not immigration advice. See how we score.