Passport Quality Index

Rank	Passport	PQI
1	Singapore	83,18
2	United Arab Emirates	82,44
3	Belgium	82,12
4	Kingdom of the Netherlands	82,04
5	Malta	82,01

Rank	Passport	VFE
1	Guatemala	68,85
2	Federated States of Micronesia	68,85
3	El Salvador	68,46
4	Paraguay	68,27
5	Venezuela	68,27

Full PQI Rankings

Passport Power (PQI)

0

100

PQI by Macro Regions

Average PQI in Region: -

Isolated Regional PQI

Evaluates passport power within specific geopolitical regions (Isolated PQI), assuming travel is restricted to that region only. The 'Home' icon (🏠) marks passports from the selected region. A score of 100 means full access to the region.

Visa-Free Efficiency (VFE)

Synergy Tool

Add a second passport to your first to discover their combined PQI and find the best options to expand your global reach.

Visa access map for combination

Select passports to view map

Best Upgrades for Your First Passport

Important: Synergy calculations are based on open-source data and may not reflect current political or legal restrictions. This tool explores theoretical combinations of passports - some pairings may be legally or practically impossible, or require renouncing an existing citizenship. Always verify legal eligibility and official visa requirements before making travel or citizenship decisions.

About the Project (From the Author)

Hello everyone! I decided to create this site based on my analytical research. I often saw news headlines claiming a certain passport became the "strongest" or ranked high. Checking the sources, I realized: almost all popular rankings use a simple quantitative approach - they just count countries.

This method reflects reality only partially. I wanted to dig a bit deeper and create an index based on the quality of access.

What is the concept?

Visa-free access to different countries cannot be evaluated 1 to 1. For a traveler, different destinations have different actual significance. We must assign a justified "weight" to each destination country. That's how the Passport Quality Index (PQI) was born.

What this index provides:

Precise Qualitative Assessment: Each passport receives a score based on the PQI methodology.
Unique Rank for Everyone: I arranged passports so they don't share the same position. Completely identical passports almost don't exist in the world.

In the process of development, I realized that the accumulated data allows deriving a couple more cool things useful for travelers or those thinking about second citizenship:

Visa-Free Efficiency (VFE): This metric shows how "effective" your visa-free destinations are. It is the median of tourist attractiveness of countries open to you. You will find insights about passports that are not so hyped but give excellent access to global tourism capital with a small number of countries.
Isolated Regional PQI: This metric evaluates passport power within specific geopolitical regions, assuming travel is restricted to that area only. It is an essential tool for digital nomads, expats, or professionals who focus their mobility within a particular region (e.g., traveling exclusively within Latin America or Southeast Asia). Importantly, the ranking includes all global passports, often revealing that "outsider" passports provide better regional access than those from within the region itself.
Synergy Tool: My favorite tool. You can experimentally add a second passport to yours and see their combined PQI, as well as the net gain from such a union. By the way, the system itself will suggest passport options that give the greatest increase in your specific case - perhaps you didn't even guess which second passports could be very powerful for you.

What's next?

I plan to update the ranking every month, refine the site, and follow dynamics. I am madly interested in visas and travel topics, and I want to build a community that will help develop this project further.

If you liked the project and want to support me - https://ko-fi.com/pqi

Disclaimer

All data on this resource is for informational purposes only and is based on open sources (including Wikipedia and World Bank), which may contain inaccuracies.

Verify Data: The Index is not a legal document. Before planning a trip, be sure to check with official sources (embassies, Timatic system).
Political Factors: In some cases, the index may indicate "Visa Required" for countries, actually closed for political reasons (e.g., restrictions for South Korean citizens visiting the DPRK). Such external factors are difficult to digitize automatically.
Margin of Error: The methodology focuses on identifying general trends. Isolated errors in the source data do not have a decisive influence on the final rating.

Calculation Methodology

📋

Conditions & Scope

Scope: UN Member States Only

The index exclusively analyzes the 193 UN member states (as of 2026). This ensures data reliability and consistency, as partially recognized or unrecognized territories often lack verifiable, up-to-date information.

Accessibility Score (Ease Coefficient)

Visa requirements are categorized into 5 tiers of accessibility, each assigned a specific weight:

1.0 Visa Not Required

0.8 Visa on Arrival

0.7 Electronic Visa (e-Visa)

0.2 Visa Required

0.0 Admission Refused

Coefficients reflect the relative difficulty of entry and may be adjusted in future updates.

Data Sources & Methodology

I used only open data sources and sought a metric that would simultaneously reflect the tourist attractiveness of all countries in the index while ensuring data availability for recent years (preferably with substantial post-COVID data, i.e., after 2020). The compromise solution was the product of tourism's share in service exports and total service exports. This metric has accumulated several years of data since 2020, effectively capturing the most modern trends in tourism.

Primary formula for a single country:

PQI = ( Σ (Si × Ki) / T ) × 100

01

Si (Destination Power)

Derived from World Bank economic data.

Raw Data: Median of (Tourism % of Exports × Total Service Exports $) over 5 years.
Codes: BX.GSR.TRVL.ZS × BX.GSR.NFSV.CD

Logarithmic Scale: Applied to handle exponential differences between economies (e.g., USA vs. Tuvalu).

Vlog = ln(Vraw)

Normalization: Scaling values from 0.01 to 1.0.

Si = 0.01 + ( (Vlog - Min) / (Max - Min) ) × 0.99

02

Ki (Accessibility Score)

The "ease of entry" coefficient (1.0 for Visa-Free, 0.2 for Visa Required, etc.) applied to the destination.

Home Country Included: The calculation includes the home country as a destination (Score 1.0). Citizenship grants unrestricted access to domestic tourism, which is an intrinsic part of global mobility.

03

T (Total Importance)

The sum of "Destination Power" for all countries globally. This represents the theoretical maximum score.

💡

In Plain English:

Imagine global tourism as a pie. PQI measures what percentage of this pie your passport allows you to "taste". Difficult visas (score 0.2) only let you have crumbs, while visa-free access hands you the whole slice.

Formula:

VFE = Median( { Si | Ki ≥ 0.99 } ) × 100

Filter: Consider only countries with visa-free entry (K ≥ 0.99).
Exclusion: The home country is excluded from the calculation. This metric assesses diplomatic efficiency, focusing strictly on external destinations and international travel potential.
Calculate: Find the median "Destination Power" (Si) of these countries.
Scale: Multiply by 100 for readability.

💡

In Plain English:

This represents the "average coolness" of your visa-free destinations. We line up all the countries you can visit visa-free by their tourism power and pick the one right in the middle.

It reveals the quality of a typical country accessible to you without a visa.

This is a conscious trade-off between precision and sustainability. I maintain this project independently. The current automated classifier allows for validation without a dedicated team.

To accurately account for the nuances of varying e-Visa complexities, I would need:

Extremely detailed data for each country.
A full team for data collection and validation.
Constant monitoring (visa policies change monthly).

I estimate the aggregate impact of such detail to be very low for this ranking system - in practice, the difference would only shift a passport by 2-3 positions within the top 50.

A direct indicator like BX.GSR.TRVL.CD (tourism receipts) from the World Bank is only available up to 2020. If the world hadn't changed so drastically since then, using older data might be acceptable. However, critical shifts have occurred:

Post-pandemic recovery.
Geopolitical shifts (sanctions, new visa policies).
Emergence of new tourism hubs.

Using the product of BX.GSR.TRVL.ZS × BX.GSR.NFSV.CD allows me to derive much fresher data (2020-2024). Crucially, this captures several years of the post-COVID era, better reflecting current tourism trends.

I acknowledge that this product, while algebraically equivalent to tourism receipts, has a margin of error (~8-10%) due to methodological differences in sources (Balance of Payments vs. National Accounts). I consider this an acceptable price for data relevance.

Axiom: No destination has zero tourist or geopolitical significance. I assign a minimal weight (0.01) even to the statistically least demanded destinations.

Using 0 as a minimum would create a mathematical paradox:

Situation

Country X has Si = 0

↓

Any visa requirement (even visa-free) yields zero contribution to PQI.

Paradox

Passport A: Visa required for X
Passport B: Entry to X completely banned

→ Both receive the same PQI score

In reality, a visa requirement is better than a ban. The minimal value of 0.01 resolves this issue.

FAQ

Please send cases to [email protected]. I will try to correct them not only at the level of my project but also make edits to Wikipedia to make accurate data available to Wiki users as well.

Your passport is likely indeed strong, but VFE evaluation works differently. You can learn more in the Methodology section and in the tooltips on the site. Essentially, the rating aims to identify unexpectedly good passports that may not have the highest number of visa-free destinations. It is logical that among them will be far from the most popular passports.

For example, Spain's VFE is lower because they have access to both the most touristic destinations and not-so-popular ones — the median quality of visa-free access is lower, but this does not make the passport bad; it is excellent for travel.

No, the tool evaluates only the mathematical benefit of the combination, not the legal legality of holding two passports.

This is a large field for experimenting with combinations, but one must understand that some passport combinations are practically impossible to have, and many states in practice require renouncing the first citizenship.

This is the main value of the Synergy Tool. Strong passports often have identical lists of visa-free countries. The tool shows that having two "top" passports is often pointless, but if access to the whole world is important to you, then perhaps a not-so-obvious option will be useful for you.

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