Singapore is a city-state of six million people with no permanent seat on the UN Security Council, no nuclear arsenal, and a defence budget of under US$20 billion. In the July 2026 edition of the Henley Passport Index, its citizens can enter 192 of 227 destinations without a visa obtained in advance. The United States budgeted $886 billion for national defence in fiscal year 2024, maintains an estimated 750 military bases abroad on a 2021 count, and sits joint 10th on the same index, with 180 destinations.
If passport power were a function of military reach, the arithmetic would run the other way. The Henley Passport Index measures something other than its name implies, and the assumption that national power translates reliably into national privilege needs revising.
What the Index Measures
The Henley Passport Index has been published since 2006, built on data supplied by the International Air Transport Association, the same organisation airlines use to decide which passengers require pre-boarding visa checks. Henley updates its data monthly and publishes headline editions several times a year, ranking 199 passports by how many of 227 possible destinations their holders can enter without obtaining a visa in advance. A destination counts if it admits that passport’s holders through a formal bilateral waiver, a visa on arrival, an electronic travel authorisation, or with no pre-travel permission requirement at all.
The index leaves out diplomatic clout, military projection, economic output and soft power in all their commonly used forms. Its score is the aggregate of decisions made by every other government about whether to require a visa from that country’s citizens before they set out.
A government that grants another country’s citizens visa-free access is making a bureaucratic risk assessment, and the decision implies no endorsement of that country’s politics or achievements. The operative question is whether a holder of this passport is likely to overstay their visa, seek unauthorised employment, or become a burden on public services. Countries that score well on the Henley index are, by and large, those whose citizens other governments have judged a low risk on those counts, and that judgement amounts to trust, which is separate from respect and from power.
Steffen Mau and colleagues compared the visa-waiver policies of more than 150 countries in 1969 and 2010. Visa-free mobility grew overall, but the gains were unequal: citizens of wealthy OECD countries accumulated access while mobility rights in other regions, above all Africa, stagnated or shrank, a pattern the authors called a “global mobility divide”. The logic underneath is consistent: governments open their borders most readily to passport holders from rich countries and restrict those from places they associate with security or immigration risk. Read that way, the index records, in aggregate, how confident other governments are that a country’s citizens will go home when they say they will.
Over the twenty-year history of the index, countries have climbed and fallen, and the movement follows a pattern.
Competing indices
Henley is not the only organisation publishing a passport ranking. Arton Capital's Passport Index counts a narrower set of 199 destinations (the 193 UN member states plus six territories), also credits e-visas issued within three working days, and updates in real time. The choices matter: on Arton's index the UAE holds first place, ahead of Singapore, with a mobility score of 182 in 2026. It first reached the top in 2018 and, apart from a slip during the pandemic, has held it ever since.
The Nomad Passport Index adds tax burden, dual citizenship rules and perception of nationality to its variables, and its rankings serve a different audience: high-net-worth individuals evaluating where to hold citizenship, rather than governments assessing bilateral visa policy. Countries that rank highly on Henley sometimes fare less well on Nomad's composite score, and vice versa. Each index answers a different question. Henley's specific utility is that it has used a consistent, neutral dataset, IATA travel information, for long enough to track change over time.The Architecture of Bilateral Trust
Each government decides for itself whether to grant visa-free access, sometimes unilaterally and sometimes in a reciprocal agreement, and the Henley index records how that access accumulates. Most of it comes from something closer to underwriting than to diplomacy in the romantic sense: each government pricing the risk that visitors will not go home.
Governments extend visa-free access when they believe the cost of doing so is lower than the friction of requiring visas. The calculation draws on several variables. GDP per capita is a proxy for whether citizens have financial incentive to stay once admitted — high-income populations are statistically less likely to overstay because they would give up more by not going home. Historical refusal and overstay rates from that country’s citizens weigh heavily, because they directly measure the risk that bureaucrats are trying to price. Bilateral trade volumes create political incentives for both sides to reduce travel friction. Membership in regional frameworks can shift the calculation wholesale.
The European Union negotiates as a bloc. Its common visa policy and EU-level visa-waiver agreements extend the same terms to the citizens of every participating member state (all except Ireland, which keeps its own visa arrangements), opening doors that a small country might never have secured on its own. The bloc also insists on reciprocity, and the exceptions show how much bilateral judgement still matters. The EU has secured visa-free travel for its citizens from every visa-exempt partner except the United States, which still requires visas from citizens of Bulgaria, Cyprus and Romania. Romania was admitted to the US Visa Waiver Program in January 2025, only for the designation to be rescinded that May. ASEAN works in a similar, less formal way: membership ties a state into institutional relationships that other governments read as evidence of stability and accountability.
Singapore’s position at the top of the index is the product of deliberate construction over sixty years. After separation from Malaysia in August 1965, Singapore joined in founding ASEAN two years later, placing itself at once within a cooperative regional architecture. The government of Lee Kuan Yew and its successors built a reputation for financial probity, low crime, and strict immigration enforcement. Those qualities count in its favour with other governments, which tend to read a state that controls its own borders as one whose citizens are unlikely to violate someone else’s. Singapore has since implemented 29 bilateral and regional free trade agreements, a commercial web that gives dozens of governments a direct stake in easy travel to and from the city-state.
The UAE’s trajectory shows the same logic in compressed form. In 2006 the UAE passport ranked 62nd. By July 2026 it had climbed to joint second place with 188 destinations, having added 153 visa-free destinations along the way, the largest gain of any passport in the index’s history. The climb came from deliberate policy: the UAE government invested heavily in diplomatic outreach, positioned the country as a global transit and financial hub, and negotiated visa-waiver arrangements as instruments of foreign economic policy.
A Ledger of Choices
In 2014 the United States shared the top rank on the Henley index with the United Kingdom and several other countries. In October 2025 it dropped out of the top 10 for the first time in the index’s history. By January 2026 it had returned to 10th, with 179 destinations, and in the July 2026 edition it remained 10th, on 180. The slide is relative: the US count edged up from 174 to 180 over those twelve years while dozens of other passports gained far more, and the index records only the position that leaves.
Brazil reinstated visa requirements for US citizens on April 10, 2025, citing the absence of reciprocity: Brazilian citizens have long been required to obtain visas before entering the United States, and the Brazilian government decided that arrangement no longer reflected a relationship of equals. China left the US off its expanding visa-free list; Vietnam excluded Americans from its latest visa-free additions; and changes in Papua New Guinea and Myanmar, followed by Somalia’s new eVisa system, eroded the US score further in 2025. Not every one of these decisions was aimed at Washington, but together they show how quickly a score erodes when a country is left off other governments’ lists.
Part of the underlying cause shows up in a different Henley metric, the Openness Index, which counts how many nationalities a country admits without a visa. In January 2026 the United States ranked 78th of 199 countries and territories on that measure, admitting 46 nationalities visa-free. A country that admits only 46 nationalities visa-free is, in effect, signalling to some 150 other countries and territories that their citizens are not automatically trusted. Those governments can reasonably extend similar caution in return.
The same mechanism that explains how Singapore built its passport score, through sustained signals of stability, reliability and openness, works in reverse for a country that has made different choices. The US decline in the Henley rankings is that logic at work, with the index recording, without editorial comment, what other governments have decided.
What comes next
In December 2025, US Customs and Border Protection published a proposal that would require citizens of 42 Visa Waiver Program countries, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Japan, to submit extensive personal data before travelling to the United States without a visa: five years of social media history, phone numbers used over the past five years, email addresses used over the past ten, and details of family members.
The public comment period closed on February 9, 2026. In May 2026 CBP said it was reworking the proposal in light of the comments and might confine the extra questions to "certain populations" selected by risk assessment rather than every traveller. As of October 2026, CBP had not published the follow-up notice in the Federal Register that must precede approval, and disclosing social media accounts on the ESTA form remained optional. European travel associations warned that the cumulative effect would make travel to the US "more complex, intrusive, and less accessible." If adopted, it would add friction to exactly the kind of visa-free travel on which reciprocity is built.The Logic of Non-Threat
At the top of the July 2026 Henley index sits Singapore, on 192. Japan, South Korea and the UAE share second place on 188, and Sweden is third on 187, followed by a dense cluster of European states. Leaving power aside, the useful question about that list is what these countries have in common in the eyes of other governments.
Japan offers one illustration. Article 9 of Japan’s 1947 constitution renounces war and the maintenance of war potential. In practice, Japan maintains a Self-Defense Force and security partnerships with the United States, but it has not conducted military operations abroad in an offensive capacity since 1945. Eight decades on, the result is a country with dense trade networks, an economy among the five largest in the world, and no recent history of using military reach to generate adversarial relationships. Few governments worry about Japanese tourists arriving with political objectives. South Korea’s case works in a similar way. It fought a war on its own soil, then spent most of the following seven decades building trade networks and exporting culture; its largest overseas war deployment, some 320,000 troops sent to Vietnam between 1964 and 1973, is now half a century in the past. It has accumulated a very different set of international relationships than its postwar circumstances might have predicted.
Singapore’s case goes further, because its non-threat premium comes from a cultivated reputation rather than a constitutional feature. Singapore has security partnerships and maintains a well-equipped defence force relative to its size, but the governments that matter for its passport score do not see it as a source of geopolitical pressure. It sits within a regional framework without dominating it, and it maintains relations with countries that are otherwise in tension with each other. The position it has carved out is one of useful neutrality, an openness that makes Singapore a place other governments want to remain on good terms with, and a different thing from Switzerland’s formal neutrality, which comes with its own history.
What these cases share is the non-threat premium. When a country generates no resentment, poses no perceived security risk and gives no one a domestic political incentive to demonstrate firmness toward it, other governments have no political constituency for restricting its citizens, and it accumulates visa waivers almost by default. No minister in Copenhagen needs to show voters that Singaporean tourists are being kept out, and political pressure to restrict Japanese travellers is rare; when China briefly shut Japanese and South Korean citizens out of its visa-free transit scheme in January 2023, it was retaliating for restrictions those governments had placed on Chinese travellers during the pandemic.
The inverse describes the US position: a country that projects power, generates resentment, or signals that other countries’ citizens are not especially welcome creates conditions in which there is a political constituency for restricting its citizens. Not every government acts on that constituency, but enough do to move the numbers.
What the Bottom Looks Like
The gap between the most and least powerful passports has widened sharply since the index began. In the July 2026 edition, Singapore’s citizens can access 192 destinations and Afghanistan’s 22. The distance between those two numbers is 170 destinations, up from 118 when the index launched in 2006.
The average passport now opens 108 destinations without a prior visa, up from 58 in 2006, but the gains have been shared unevenly, in a pattern that does not track objective risk in any neutral sense.
Schengen visa rejection rates make the pattern legible. Henley calculates that the rejection rate for African applicants to the Schengen area rose from about 19 percent in 2015 to about 27 percent in 2024, far above the 14.8 percent refusal rate for all applicants worldwide that year. In 2024 Algeria’s rejection rate was about 35 percent; China’s was under 5 percent.
Professor Mehari Taddele Maru, writing for Henley, borrows the scholarly term “conditional racial discrimination” to describe what these rejection patterns reveal: a structure in which the nationality printed on a passport, more than the circumstances of individual applicants, sets the probability of access. Other scholars trace that structure back to the passport regime itself. Anam Soomro argues that the universalisation of the passport regime under the League of Nations twisted freedom of movement, once treated as an innate human entitlement, into a system that ranks mobility through a hierarchy of national origins. John Torpey describes how modern states came to monopolise the “legitimate means of movement”, making people dependent on state permission to cross borders.
The connection between that history and the present distribution requires care. In October 1920 the League of Nations gathered twenty-two states in Paris for a conference on passports and customs formalities, which standardised the first international passport format at a moment when the states with the most influence over the process were also the states with the largest empires. Rather than declaring a racial hierarchy, the conference built into international travel a technical system whose practical effects reproduced one. That system is still running, and the 2024 rejection rate for Algerian applicants to the Schengen area fits its pattern.
The UAE exception
The UAE's climb from 62nd place to joint second complicates any reading of the current distribution as a fixed hierarchy. The hierarchy is not fixed, but the one country that has climbed it from so far down did so through two decades of sustained diplomatic outreach, reciprocal visa agreements and the cultivation of a low-risk national profile.
The UAE brought to that project oil wealth, a government capable of implementing long-range foreign policy objectives, and a city, Dubai, that gave it leverage as a global transit hub. Few countries lower down the index can bring all three. The UAE exception leaves the structural argument standing and shows what climbing out of the lower tiers has taken in the one case where it happened. For most of the countries whose citizens face Schengen rejection rates above 20 percent, nothing comparable is within reach.What the Number Means
Other governments set a passport’s score. It sums their collective assessment, distributed across 227 destination decisions, of whether a country’s citizens are welcome.
Seen that way, the American figures read differently. The US position of 78th out of 199 on Henley’s Openness Index is a metric about American immigration policy, and it is also part of the upstream cause of the US passport score, because it is one of the signals other governments read when deciding whether to extend reciprocity. Brazil said as much when it reimposed visas in 2025.
The gap between Singapore and Afghanistan reflects the same mechanism operating on different inputs. Singapore spent sixty years building the signals that other governments reward. Afghanistan has spent much of the same period as a site of great-power contest, civil war and externally imposed political rupture, conditions under which building any of those signals is close to impossible. For the people who hold either passport, the gap records the circumstances they were born into and the choices the governments around them have made.
What a passport ranking records is a distributed, uncoordinated verdict: the aggregate of the authorities behind 227 destinations, each acting in its own interest and responding to its own domestic politics as it weighs perceived risk and expected reciprocity. The most powerful countries, by conventional measures, do not necessarily come out best; the ones that do are those other governments have collectively decided they are comfortable having around.
Each of the 199 passports in the index carries a number that is the residue of thousands of individual bilateral calculations. At one end of that array, citizens can access 192 of the 227 destinations the index tracks without a visa obtained in advance; at the other end, 22. The index that records that gap, 170 destinations in the July 2026 edition against 118 in 2006, is compiled from the same data airlines use at check-in.
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