How often you will see your parents after moving abroad comes down to three numbers: their age, how many trips you make a year, and how long each one lasts. If your mother is 75 and you fly home once a year for a week, the Social Security actuaries’ latest period life table gives her 13.1 more years on average. That’s about 13 visits. At seven days each, 92 days together.
Three months. Spread across the rest of her life.
For a 75-year-old father it’s 11 visits and 80 days.
Those numbers aren’t pleasant to run. I think they’re worth running once, before the move if you can, because the trip home tends to get planned like a dental cleaning: once a year, whenever fares dip, a week because that’s what work allows. Almost nobody sits down and counts.
This page does the counting. It also shows why the number is softer than it looks, and why the lever that moves it most usually isn’t the one people reach for first.
Where the numbers come from
The table comes from the Office of the Chief Actuary at Social Security. The current edition is the Period Life Table for 2023, the one used in the 2026 Trustees Report. It covers every age from 0 to 119, women and men separately. For each age it gives the chance of dying within the year, how many people out of 100,000 born are still alive, and the average number of years left.
Two things before you read anything into it.
“Period” means the table takes the death rates of a single year, 2023, and applies them to the rest of a person’s life as if they’d never change. If death rates keep falling, real people will live a little longer than the table says. It’s a conservative ruler.
And it’s an average. It isn’t a forecast for your mother.
The same table shows how wide the spread is. Out of every 100 American women alive at 75, about 86 are still alive at 80, about 66 at 85 and about 41 at 90. For men, the same three numbers are 81, 57 and 30.
So “13.1 years” really means something like this: four women in ten her age will reach 90, and roughly one in seven won’t see 80. I got those by dividing one column of the table by another, the number still alive at 85 by the number alive at 75, and so on. You can repeat it in half a minute.
Use the result as a planning horizon. It tells you if you’re looking at dozens of visits or a handful. It can’t tell you which visit is the last one, and nothing can.
How often you will see your parents after moving abroad, at one trip a year
Here’s the whole picture at five-year steps. Years left come straight from the table. Visits assume one trip a year, and days assume seven days a trip.
| Parent’s age | Mother: years left | Visits | Days together | Father: years left | Visits | Days together |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 60 | 24.73 | 25 | 173 | 21.79 | 22 | 153 |
| 65 | 20.66 | 21 | 145 | 18.12 | 18 | 127 |
| 70 | 16.76 | 17 | 117 | 14.66 | 15 | 103 |
| 75 | 13.10 | 13 | 92 | 11.42 | 11 | 80 |
| 80 | 9.82 | 10 | 69 | 8.50 | 9 | 60 |
| 85 | 7.02 | 7 | 49 | 6.04 | 6 | 42 |
| 90 | 4.80 | 5 | 34 | 4.11 | 4 | 29 |
The visit count is the number people fixate on. Look at the days.
A parent at 65 feels like someone with decades of holidays ahead. At one week a year, it’s 145 days with a mother and 127 with a father. Under five months, either way.
Count days, not trips
A trip is a unit airlines sell. A day is what you actually get.
Take the same 75-year-old mother and the same 13.1 years, and change only the shape of the visits:
| How you visit | Days together |
|---|---|
| One 7-day trip home a year | 92 |
| One 14-day trip a year | 183 |
| Two 14-day trips a year | 367 |
| One 14-day trip home, plus six weeks of her staying with you | 734 |
The first line and the last are the same woman and the same years. Eight times the days.
The flight is the expensive, exhausting, fixed part. Once you’ve paid for the ticket and survived the jet lag, every extra day at the end of the trip costs very little. It’s easy to cut a trip short to save vacation days, then spend the saved days on something you won’t remember.
And a seven-day visit is rarely seven days with your mother. The first one goes to jet lag. Then siblings, old friends, the errands you save up for home, the drive back to the airport. If you work remotely, a three-week stay changes this: work mornings, spend afternoons with her. That’s more real time than two separate week-long visits that each lose their first and last day.
Let them come to you
The math runs in both directions. Parents fly too, and in most places Americans move to, a visiting parent can stay far longer than you’ll ever get off work.
What a US passport gets a visitor, as of late September 2026:
| Where you live | How long a parent can visit without a visa |
|---|---|
| Spain, Portugal and the rest of the Schengen area | 90 days in any 180-day period, counted on a rolling basis |
| Mexico | Up to 180 days; a visa is needed only for longer stays |
| Costa Rica | Up to 180 days, though the State Department says it isn’t guaranteed |
| Thailand | 30 days since September 15, 2026; it was 60 before |
The Schengen rule trips people up. From each day of the stay you count back 180 days, and the total can’t go over 90. The EU’s short-stay calculator does the counting for you. A stopover in Paris or Rome on the way in counts toward the same 90.
Thailand is the reason to check again before anyone books. Rules move. The Tourism Authority of Thailand announced the cut on September 1, with two weeks’ notice.
Six weeks fits inside every one of those limits except Thailand’s. Over the same 13.1 years, one six-week stay a year adds up to 550 days.
The week-long trips home give you 92.
Two practical things if a parent is coming to you.
Health cover. Medicare usually doesn’t pay for care outside the US, with a few exceptions. Some Medigap policies may cover emergency care abroad. Find out whether theirs does, and if not, buy travel medical insurance for the length of the stay, before the ticket. I don’t have an arrangement with any insurer. For how this works when you’re the one living abroad, see whether Medicare covers you abroad.
The flight itself. A long-haul flight at 82 isn’t the same as one at 67. Book direct if there’s a direct route, even if it costs more. Ask for airport assistance when you book, not at the gate. And bring them over when you’re not working flat out, or the visit becomes them sitting in your apartment waiting for you.
Three things people get wrong about the number
“She has 13 years.” She has an average of 13.1. Roughly one woman in seven her age won’t reach 80, and four in ten will reach 90. Plan with the average. Don’t bet on it.
“More trips is the fix.” More trips means more flights, and flights are the expensive, tiring part. Longer trips and visits in the other direction move the number much further for the same money.
“Parents can only come for a week or two.” In Spain or Portugal they can stay up to 90 days in any 180. In Mexico, up to 180. Most people who move abroad never ask.
The honest downside: this is a blunt tool. The table knows nothing about your parent’s health, your siblings or your job, and it can’t tell you when long flights stop being easy for them. Only that the years get shorter.
Five ways to change the math
- Stretch the trip rather than adding one. Going from 7 days to 14 doubles your days together without a second transatlantic flight.
- Front-load the big trips. If there’s a trip you’ve been meaning to take together, her hometown, the national park, the cousins in Ohio, do it at 70, not 80.
- Invite them for a season, not a week. Inside Schengen, up to 90 days in 180.
- Split the direction. One trip home, one stay with you. For a 75-year-old mother that’s 734 days instead of 92.
- Book the next one before you leave. Put the dates in the calendar on the last day of this visit, while everybody’s sad and nobody argues about fares.
If both parents visit together, the days are the same days, and the shorter of their two numbers is the honest one to plan around.
Run it once for each parent. Then look at the days column, not the visits.
