The world’s most powerful passports for 2025

The Most Powerful Passports in the World in 2025

When the Passport Index was read on 15 January 2025, the United Arab Emirates held the most powerful passport in the world, with a mobility score of 180. Spain was second on 179. Then came a fourteen-way tie, with every passport from Finland to Ireland sharing third place on 178. The index counts 198 destinations, and two points cover all sixteen passports on the chart.

The order inside the tie is not a ranking. The publisher lists tied passports by their visa-free count, then by the UN’s Human Development Index, but all fourteen carry the same rank: third.

First Place Without the Most Visa-Free Countries

The mobility score adds visa-free entry to visas on arrival, and the index also counts e-visas issued within three days. On visa-free entry alone, the UAE is not first. Spain, Finland and France each open 134 countries with no visa at all, one more than the UAE’s 133. The UAE’s lead comes from 47 visas on arrival, against Spain’s 45 and Finland’s 44.

The same arithmetic splits the tie. Ireland reaches 178 with 127 visa-free countries and 51 visas on arrival; Finland reaches it with 134 and 44. For an Irish traveller, seven more of those 178 countries mean a stop at a visa desk on arrival.

Fifteen of the Sixteen Are European

Thirteen of these passports belong to members of the European Union, and two more, Switzerland and Norway, belong to the Schengen area. Partner countries tend to set one visa rule for the whole bloc, and EU law lets the Union respond together when a country exempts some members’ citizens but not others. That helps explain why so many land on exactly the same score.

They are also rich. In the World Bank’s 2025 edition of GDP per capita, all fifteen European countries are among the 50 highest readings of 185, and Ireland and Luxembourg have the second and third highest. The UAE is missing from that edition; in 2024 it had the 16th highest reading of 195.

Getting In and Getting Out Are Measured Separately

The Passport Index asks whether other countries let a traveller in. V-Dem’s freedom of foreign movement score asks whether their own government lets them travel and emigrate. In its 2025 reading, Germany has the highest score of the 176 countries covered and Spain the fourth highest. The UAE scores lower than 133 of the 176, well below every other passport on this chart. The bottom of the passport table, where both questions often get a poor answer, is in the world’s least powerful passports for 2025.

What Visa-Free Access Is Worth

A traveller from Pakistan, writing about a visit to Britain in June 2024, described meeting a Chinese student there on a post-study work visa. The student had no interest in a British passport and planned to go home once the permit ran out. A strong passport opens doors for short visits, typically tourism or business trips, often capped at 90 days. Studying or working abroad generally needs a separate permit, as the student’s did.

The UAE shows the gap plainly. UN DESA counts 74% of the people living there in 2024 as international migrants, the third-highest share of 221 places, and most of them travel on another country’s passport.