Singapore has landed in the number one spot of the newly released 2025 edition of the Henley Passport Index, a ranking of the world’s passports in order of the number of destinations their holders can access without obtaining a visa before arrival. Singapore has the most powerful passport in the world, according to the Index, with visa-free or visa-upon-arrival access to 195 destinations.
Using data from the International Air Transport Association (IATA), Henley & Partners, a London-based global citizenship and residence advisory firm, ranks the passports of 193 United Nations member countries, plus six nonmembers (Taiwan, Macao, Hong Kong, Kosovo, Palestinian Territories, and Vatican City). Additionally, the list includes territories annexed to other countries—like French Polynesia and the British Virgin Islands—in the collection of 227 possible travel destinations that passport holders can access.
Japan came in second place with 193 destinations. Six countries came in joint third place with visa-free access to 192 destinations: Finland, France, Germany, Italy, South Korea, and Spain.
The United States came in ninth with access to 186 destinations. The United States was once in second place on the index.
In an accompanying press release for the Henley Global Mobility Report 2025 Q1, Annie Pforzheimer, senior associate at Washington think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the ongoing decline of the United States’s global mobility is predictable. “Voters during the 2024 presidential campaign were fed a narrative that America can (and should) stand alone. Ultimately, if tariffs and deportations are the Trump administration’s default policy tools, not only will the U.S. continue to decline on the mobility index on a comparative basis, but it will probably do so in absolute terms as well,” said Pforzheimer.
There’s a wide gap between access offered at the top versus the bottom of the list. Afghanistan is currently last in the rankings, at 106th place, with access to 26 destinations. Syria and Iraq ranked only slightly higher, with access to 27 and 31 destinations, respectively.
According to the Henley Passport Index, 2025’s most powerful passports in the world are:
- Singapore (195 destinations)
- Japan (193 destinations)
- Finland, France, Germany, Italy, South Korea, Spain (192 destinations)
- Austria, Denmark, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden (191 destinations)
- Belgium, New Zealand, Portugal, Switzerland, United Kingdom (190 destinations)
- Australia, Greece (189 destinations)
- Canada, Malta, Poland (188 destinations)
- Czechia, Hungary (187 destinations)
- Estonia, United States (186 destinations)
- Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia (185 destinations)
Henley & Partners isn’t the only company that indexes the strength of global passports. The Passport Index by Arton takes into account the same 199 passports as the Henley Index in its rankings, but it excludes territories annexed to other countries and updates its rankings in real time and weights the list based a mix of mobility, visa-free access, and the United Nations Development Programme Human Development Index. So Arton’s rankings are slightly different.
According to Arton Capital, here’s how 2025’s most powerful passports in the world rank:
- United Arab Emirates (179 destinations)
- Spain (178 destinations)
- Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Switzerland (177 destinations)
- Hungary, Poland, Sweden (176 destinations)
- Czechia, Croatia, Estonia, Slovakia, South Korea (175 destinations)
- Japan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, New Zealand, Singapore, Slovenia (174 destinations)
- Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, Lithuania, Malta, Romania, United Kingdom (173 destinations)
- Iceland, United States (172 destinations)
- Cyprus (171 destinations)
- Malaysia, Monaco (169 destinations)
To see the full rankings, visit henleypassportindex.com and passportindex.com.
This article was most recently published on July 25, 2024, and was updated with new information on January 22, 2025.
