Singapore is now officially the most powerful passport in the world according to the Henley Passport Index, which is based on exclusive and official data from IATA, knocking Japan off the top spot for the first time in five years.

Coming in first, Singapore passport holders are able to visit 192 travel destinations out of 227 around the world visa-free.

Germany, Italy, and Spain all move up into second place with visa-free access to 190 destinations, while Japan, now shares third place with six other nations – Austria, Finland, France, Luxembourg, South Korea, and Sweden –with access to 189 destinations without a prior visa.

The UK jumps up two places on the latest ranking to fourth place while the US plummeted a further two places to eighth spot with access to just 184 destinations visa-free.

Of the countries sitting in the Top 10, the US has seen the smallest increase in its score on the Henley Passport Index over the past decade, securing visa-free access to just 12 additional destinations between 2013 and 2023. Singapore, by comparison, has increased its score by 25, pushing it five places up the ranking over the past 10 years to number one spot.

The three weakest passports in the world includes Afghanistan, which remains entrenched at the bottom of the Henley Passport Index, with a visa-free access score of just 27, followed by Iraq (score of 29), and Syria (score of 30).

Meanwhile, Henley & Partners has conducted exclusive new research into the relationship between a country’s openness to foreigners – how many nations it allows to cross its borders visa-free – and its own citizens’ travel freedom, gauged using the Henley Passport Index.

The new Henley Openness Index ranks all 199 countries worldwide according to the number of nationalities they permit entry to without a prior visa.

The Top 20 ‘most open’ countries are all small island nations or African states, except for Cambodia. There are 12 completely open countries that offer visa-free or visa-on-arrival entry to all 198 passports in the world (not counting their own), namely: Burundi, Comoro Islands, Djibouti, Guinea-Bissau, Maldives, Micronesia, Mozambique, Rwanda, Samoa, Seychelles, Timor-Leste, and Tuvalu.

At the bottom of the Henley Openness Index, four countries score zero, permitting no visa-free access for any passport – Afghanistan, North Korea, Papua New Guinea, and Turkmenistan. They are followed by five countries that provide visa-free access to fewer than five other nationalities – Libya, Bhutan, Eritrea, Equatorial Guinea, and India.