Passport indexes count how many countries you can enter. We summed how long you can stay: 11,031 visa-free stay limits, Schengen counted once. The US jumps from 41st to 1st, Singapore falls to 19th, and Georgia gives most of the world a year.
Every passport ranking you have seen measures the same thing: how many doors open. Singapore opens the most, the headline writes itself, and nobody asks what happens after you walk through. A door that closes behind you in 14 days and a door that lets you stay a year count identically.
So we counted time instead. Our visa matrix records a stated stay limit for 11,031 passport-destination pairs where no visa is needed. Summing those limits per passport gives a number we call stay-days: the total time a passport holder could spend abroad, visa-free, if they used every allowance in full.
One correction makes the number honest. The 29 Schengen states share a single allowance of 90 days in any 180, so a naive sum credits a German or American traveler with 29 separate 90-day stays they cannot actually take. That error inflates every Schengen-eligible passport by exactly 2,520 days. We count Schengen once.
The ranking reshuffles
| Passport | Stay-days | Rank by stay-days | Rank by countries entered |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 8,547 | 1 | 41 |
| Belgium | 7,724 | 2 | 3 |
| Italy | 7,694 | 3 | 8 |
| United Kingdom | 7,662 | 6 | 34 |
| United Arab Emirates | 7,590 | 8 | 2 |
| Germany | 7,574 | 11 | 7 |
| Canada | 7,527 | 16 | 37 |
| Singapore | 7,500 | 19 | 1 |
| South Korea | 7,346 | 23 | 36 |
| Japan | 7,302 | 32 | 35 |
| Malaysia | 7,018 | 41 | 10 |
The American passport enters 112 countries visa-free, which places it 41st by door count. It ranks first by time because its doors are unusually long: 180 days in Mexico and Canada, a full year in Georgia, Albania and Palau. Singapore opens 129 doors, more than anyone, but a lot of them are Southeast Asian 30-day stamps; it lands 19th. Malaysia is the starkest case, tenth by countries and 41st by days, for the same reason.
Europeans break the metric, in their favor
The EU passports in that table carry an asterisk the matrix can't price. Each one also lists about 36 visa-free destinations with no stated limit, and nearly all of them are other EU and EEA states, where an EU citizen can live and work indefinitely. No finite sum captures "unlimited in 30 countries." Read the EU rows as a floor. The US number is the largest finite total; the EU passports are the ones that never have to count at all.
Where the long stays are
The world's default is short and standardized: 68.3% of all stated limits are exactly 90 days, and another 17.4% are 30. Only 766 pairs allow six months or more.
Georgia is in a category of its own. It grants 89 passports a year-long stay (recorded as 360 days) and averages 321 days across every passport it waives, nearly double the next most generous country. After Georgia: Mexico (a flat 180 days for all 63 passports it waives), El Salvador (179 average), Armenia (176), and Antigua and Barbuda (169). If you want a long base for a multi-country trip, the Caucasus and Mexico are where the clock runs slowest.
The stingiest end is a tight cluster around 30 days: the Philippines, Angola, the Dominican Republic, Mozambique and Eswatini, with Thailand at 33 since September's cut from 60 to 30 days. São Tomé and Príncipe averages 18.
Generosity is rarely mutual
A Barbadian gets 360 days in Georgia. A Georgian gets 28 in Barbados. Georgia hands Malaysians, Serbians and Thais a year and receives 30 days back from each. Peru gives Bruneians 180 days; Bruneians' government gives Peruvians 14. These lopsided pairs are the long-stay version of the one-way doors we mapped in July, and the pattern is the same: small countries courting visitors set generous terms unilaterally and do not wait for reciprocity.
The bottom of the table
Afghanistan's passport totals 231 stay-days across four countries. Iraq, Syria, North Korea and Yemen sit between 396 and 441. The spread from first to last is 37 to 1, much wider than the five-to-one ratio door counts suggest, because weak passports lose on both axes at once: fewer doors, and shorter stays behind the ones that open.
Method
Source: our visa matrix, built from the maintained passport-index-data project plus dated manual corrections (the Thailand cut among them), October 2026. Stay-days counts only visa-free pairs with a stated limit. ETAs, eVisas and visa-on-arrival are excluded, so the US-to-UK route (now an ETA) contributes nothing, and the measure rewards true visa freedom only. Schengen counts once at the passport's Schengen limit. Ties share the order they appear in the data. These are legal maxima per country, and plenty of countries cap total time across rolling windows, so check any long plan pair by pair in the visa checker. The per-country openness table behind it is free at passport-welcome.csv, and the destination-side ranking lives at most welcoming countries.