Specialised Passports and Balanced Passports

2026-09-30

Two passports can open the same number of destinations and be shaped entirely differently: one concentrated in a single region, the other spread evenly across the world. The score cannot tell them apart, because the score is a count.

Here is a measure that can, applied to all 197 passports in our table.

The measure

For each passport, take its largest region as a share of its open destinations, and divide by that region's share of the world.

• 1.00 means access is shaped exactly like the world: no concentration.
• 1.80 means its largest region is represented at nearly twice the rate you would expect if access were spread evenly.

The measure is deliberately simple, and anyone can reproduce it from the destination lists published on this site.

Both ends of the table

Counted from our dataset in October 2026, among passports opening 60 destinations or more:

Note Iraq: its largest region is Africa, not Asia. A passport's strongest region is not necessarily its own.

What the two ends mean

Concentration is a floor, not a ceiling. A passport with around half its access inside its own region generally holds that access through regional arrangements rather than through global negotiation. That access is dense and close to home: for travel within the region it can be as useful as a far higher-scoring passport, and the ranking understates it badly for anyone whose travel is regional.

Balance comes from volume, not design. The evenly spread passports are not spread by intention; they are near 1.00 because they open most of the world, and a passport that opens almost everything necessarily resembles the world's own shape. Balance here is an arithmetic consequence of a high score.

So the two ends are not two strategies. They are a strong-passport pattern and a regional-access pattern, and the single number ranks them on one axis only.

Why this matters when you read a rank

If your travel is overwhelmingly regional, a concentration figure above 1.5× means the ranking is measuring something other than your experience. Your passport may sit in the middle of the table and open nearly half of the destinations you would actually consider.

This is the same point article 12 makes for a single pair, measured here across the whole table: see equal score, different worlds.

And it cuts the other way too. A high-scoring, evenly spread passport is broad but not therefore deep: breadth says nothing about how long you may stay or what you may do, which is covered in visa-free is not permission to work.

Reproducing it

Every figure comes from the destination lists on this site. For any passport: count its open destinations by region, divide each region's count by the total, and compare with that region's share of the 197 countries in our table.

Our visa data comes from the open Passport Index dataset, refreshed automatically every day, with our own verified corrections applied on top. It is not an official government feed.

Related

• Equal score, different worlds
• Which regions are open to the world
• What a passport ranking measures

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