Not All of Your Score Is Visa-Free

2026-10-06

Every passport ranking, ours included, adds two different things together: destinations you can simply fly to, and destinations where you still have to pay, apply or queue — just not in advance.

Both count as one point. They are not one experience.

Two passports on 95

Counted from our dataset in October 2026, Sierra Leone and Turkmenistan hold exactly the same score:

Sierra Leone has 2.6 times as many destinations needing nothing at all before departure. The ranking says they are identical.

This is the largest compositional gap at an equal score in our table, and it is the clearest illustration of what the single number merges.

The gradient across the table

The pattern is systematic, not random. Share of each score that is visa on arrival or eVisa rather than genuinely visa-free:

The lower the score, the more of it is conditional. A passport near the top is roughly 70% unconditional access. A passport near the bottom can be 95% conditional — a score of 74 that means four destinations you can simply fly to.

So the gap between the top and bottom of the ranking is considerably wider than the scores suggest. The score compresses it; the composition does not.

Why the two categories are not comparable

A visa-free entry costs nothing and requires nothing before you fly.

A visa on arrival means a queue, a fee, usually cash, and a decision made while you stand there. It is normally available only at specific ports of entry, and it can be suspended without notice.

An eVisa or eTA means a form, a fee and an approval that must be held before boarding — airlines check it. Approval is not instant for every country, and a refusal is possible.

The difference between these is set out in visa-free, eVisa, eTA or visa on arrival.

Should rankings separate them?

An argument exists for counting only genuinely visa-free access. We do not do that, for a reason worth stating: a visa on arrival is real access. Excluding it would understate passports that hold a great deal of it, and the resulting number would be just as partial in the other direction.

What we can do is publish the split, which we do on every country page, and say plainly that the headline number is a sum of two unlike things.

That is the honest position: the number is useful and it is coarse. Both.

What to do with your own score

Open your country page and look at the breakdown rather than the total. Then ask the question the total cannot answer: of the destinations you would actually consider, how many are green, and how many need a form?

For a traveller who books late or travels often, that distinction matters more than twenty points of rank.

• All countries
• Visa checker

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

• Visa-free, eVisa, eTA or visa on arrival
• Equal score, different worlds
• What a passport ranking measures
• Why your rank moved

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