World openness

Every pair of countries has a rule: with a Brazilian passport you enter Portugal with no visa, but the United States needs one. Add up every pair in the world where entry is free and you get a single measure of how open the planet is.

If all 39.402 possible pairs were free, the index would hit that ceiling. Today we sit at 18.924 - roughly 48% of full openness.

13k15k18k20k202020212022202320242025
Theoretical maximum: 39.402 pairs. Hover the chart to read each date.
Series low
13.541
2021-05-13
Series high
18.965
2024-12-04
Change over the period
+37.7%
2020-11-192025-01-02

The series starts in November 2020. Earlier snapshots use a numeric encoding the source never documented, and guessing at it would produce falsely precise numbers. The period covered shows the post-pandemic recovery, not the collapse.

Passport Index Dataset (ilyankou, MIT)