Miles flown and days away: Trump next to Biden, Obama, Bush and Clinton

Comparing presidents on travel sounds simple and almost never is. Different record-keepers count different things: nights away, days with events outside Washington, trips abroad, days abroad, rounds of golf. Below, each number is labelled with what it actually counts and where it came from.

Trips abroad, term by term

The most consistent long-run series is the White House Transition Project's travel study, which counted every presidential journey abroad from 1977 to September 2020 from the Public Papers of the Presidents and White House schedules (PDF).

Two patterns stand out. The number of trips has grown while the average trip has got shorter — presidents fly more often and stay away for less time. And second terms are not reliably busier abroad than first terms: Clinton's second term was, Obama's was not.

Distance is missing from this table on purpose. There is no published, comparable mileage series for modern presidents: the figures that circulate online are usually estimates built from flight hours or trip lists. Rather than repeat one, we link the trip-and-days records that do exist, including the National Taxpayers Union Foundation's archive of international travel studies here.

Why mileage is not compared here

This site calculates a minimum distance between verified reported appearances, but its historical archive is being citation-checked before those totals are used in a presidential comparison. The leaderboards show the current site measure; it is not presented as a like-for-like historical mileage series.

Days at private homes, golf clubs and on holiday

This is where comparisons get slippery. The nearest thing to a like-for-like count is the tally of full and partial days each president spent at Camp David, at a second home, or on holiday — again from the Transition Project study, drawing on Mark Knoller's records (PDF).

Read those two columns together rather than separately. Reagan and George W. Bush both had private ranches that doubled as working residences, and both used Camp David heavily; Trump's total is concentrated in his own properties in Florida and New Jersey rather than at Camp David. Time at a golf property specifically has been tallied separately by news organisations, which have consistently found far more such days in Trump's term than in Obama's at the same point (CNN), and more early-term private getaways than Obama, Bush or Clinton (New York Times).

Why we do not call any of this "days off"

A president at a golf club is not necessarily off duty, and a president in the Oval Office is not necessarily working hard. Even the fact-checkers who keep these tallies say so: the counts of "vacation days" differ wildly depending on whether partial days, working weekends and travel days are included (FactCheck.org). Staff, communications and the machinery of government travel with the office.

So on this site the equivalent board is called days at leisure locations, and it counts exactly that: days someone was reported at a place matching a leisure keyword, such as a golf resort. It is an undercount, it says nothing about hours worked, and it is not evidence of a day off.

What would settle it

• Published flight logs with hours per aircraft, which would give real distance rather than minimum distance.
• A single definition of a day away — nights outside the capital is the cleanest — applied across administrations.
• Separating official events at a private residence from stays with no public schedule, which most tallies currently merge.

Until those exist, the honest answer to "who travelled furthest?" is that the public record supports counts of trips and days, not miles. Everything on this site is built from that kind of published evidence, with a link on every data point.