We measure passports by the flow they unlock, not the countries they list.
The Open Door Index assigns every passport a score equal to the sum of annual tourist arrivals at every destination its citizens can enter without applying for a visa in advance. A passport that opens France (100M visitors a year) outscores one that opens Tuvalu (1,000 visitors). Every number on this site is a tourist-arrivals figure β never a country count.
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The formula, in one line.
For every passport p, we compute: score(p) = Ξ£ visitors(d) over every destination d that p's citizens can enter visa-free, on visa-on-arrival, with an electronic travel authorization, or under a numeric-day stay agreement. We do not divide by population. We do not count destinations. The score is in millions of annual visitors of accessible world.
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02
What counts as "open access".
A destination is "accessible" to a passport-holder if they can arrive without applying for a visa beforehand. That covers four categories from the source dataset: visa-free, visa-on-arrival, ETA (electronic travel authorization, e.g. Australia, Sri Lanka), and numeric-day stay agreements (e.g. "30 days" or "90 days" without a separate visa). E-visas do not count β an e-visa is still a visa application, just submitted online instead of at an embassy. Each citizen also has access to their own home country, included in the sum.
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Where the visitor numbers come from.
Annual international tourist arrivals are pulled from the UN Tourism (UNWTO) inbound-arrivals database. For each destination we use the latest reliable year β mostly 2023β2024 β and skip the 2020β2022 pandemic collapse where it would misstate a country's normal flow. Each destination has a single visitors-per-year number in millions. The dataset covers 199 destinations β every country and territory listed in the source passport-index dataset β including small island states, partial recognitions, and self-governing territories.
Where the UN series has gone stale, we refresh it from national statistics and the World Bank. Six destinations needed it most:
Destination UN series said We use Source Russia 19.9M (2005) 9.7M (2024) TASS Australia 5.1M (2006) 7.6M (2024) Statista Syria 5.1M (2011) 1.5M (2023) Trading Economics Zimbabwe 2.1M (2001) 1.6M (2023) Trading Economics Pakistan 1.0M (2012) 1.0M (2023) Statista Cameroon 0.8M (2012) 1.1M (2023) World Bank -
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Where the visa rules come from.
The bilateral access matrix comes from the open-source passport-index-dataset on GitHub (originally ilyankou/passport-index-dataset; this site uses our maintained fork with consular updates through June 2026). For every ordered pair (passport country, destination country), the dataset records the access category. We re-verify any consequential change against the issuing country's foreign ministry or embassy site before applying it.
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Two things we deliberately don't do.
We do not divide by population. Per-capita rankings make microstates win for arithmetic reasons β Andorra (80,000 people) topping a list of passports felt absurd, and was. We do not count countries. Counting destinations treats Tuvalu (1,000 visitors a year) as equivalent to France (100 million). The whole point of this index is that those two unlocks are not the same; ranking by visitor flow says so honestly.
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How ties are handled.
Many passports score within a million arrivals of each other β the EU Schengen states are a good example. Where two or more passports tie at a given score, they share a rank: the table renders the rank number once, on the first row of the tied group, and leaves it blank on the rows beneath until the next rank starts. No = glyph, no ΓN badge β just a quietly shared number. As you scroll through a large tied group, the rank pins to the top of the table so the group's identity stays visible.
We rank passports by where the world can
wants to go.
Every score on this site is a tourist-flow number, sourced from UNWTO and a maintained fork of the open passport-index dataset. No counting. No averaging away the difference between a Pacific atoll and Paris.