Sat. Feb 15th, 2025

Discover the World’s Most Influential Passports with the Top 10 Rankings!

According to the most recent Henley Passport Index, Singapore has surpassed Japan to earn the title of most powerful passport in the world. Singapore’s passport enables visa-free travel to 192 of the world’s 227 places, while Japan, which previously held the top spot for five years, fell to third place as the number of visa-free locations for its passport shrank.

Henley assesses every nation on the planet, using data from the International Air Transport Association (IATA), and then ranks every passport according to the number of places its owners may go without a visa. Every three months, the report is revised. A passport earns points for each nation that its holder is permitted to visit without a visa or by merely acquiring a visa on arrival rather than seeking pre-departure authorization.

With visa-free access to 190 destinations, Germany, Italy, and Spain move up to second position, while holders of Japanese passports join those of six other countries — Austria, Finland, France, Luxembourg, South Korea, and Sweden — in third place with visa-free access to 189 locations.

The United States, which formerly topped the list and held that position for over a decade, has now dropped two spots to eighth. On the other side, the United Kingdom has risen to fourth place, a position it last held in 2017, after witnessing a decrease as a result of Brexit.

The three poorest passports in the world—Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria—remain at the bottom of the Henley Passport Index with scores of only 27 for visa-free travel. India, which now shares the 80th slot on the index with Togo and Senegal and enjoys visa-free travel to 57 nations, has moved up five points from last year.

Only eight countries worldwide currently have less access to visa-free travel than they did a decade ago, according to Dr. Christian H. Kaelin, Chairman of Henley and Partners and the creator of the passport index concept, who stated this in a press release. Other countries have been more successful in securing greater travel freedom for their citizens.

The top 10 most powerful passports in the world are listed below:

  1. Singapore
  2. Spain, Italy, and Germany
  3. South Korea, Japan, Luxembourg, Austria, Finland, France, and Sweden
  4. The Netherlands, Denmark, Ireland, and the United Kingdom
  5. Malta, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, and Belgium
  6. Poland, Hungary, and Australia
  7. Greece and Canada
  8. The United States and Lithuania
  9. Slovakia, Slovenia, and Latvia
  10. Iceland and Estonia