Frequently asked questions.

The ATE Passport Index, also called the AT Express Passport Index or ATE Index, scores 199 passports out of 100 on seven pillars that matter to families choosing a second citizenship. They are the quality and durability of travel access, life and safety, the economic and financial environment, tax, digital readiness, and rights and stability.

A visa-free count treats every destination equally and ignores everything else. The ATE Index weights destinations by economic size and by how much travellers value them, checks whether that access has recently been lost or is at risk, and adds six other pillars. Travel access is 35% of the total.

Both have strong access counts. The United Arab Emirates is #1 by access count and Malaysia #4. Once the other pillars are added, they rank #32 and #53 on the ATE Index. The reverse also happens. Qatar is #92 by access count but #46 on the ATE Index, and Liechtenstein is #37 by count but #1 on the ATE Index. Each passport’s pillar scores are in the full ranking table.

At least one pillar of that passport had less than half of its data available, so we used the regional median for that pillar. 48 ranked passports carry the mark. Treat their scores as estimates.

Five of its seven pillars would have to be estimated, so a ranking would mostly reflect assumptions. We list its estimated score for reference only.

Access count is the number of destinations a passport can enter visa-free, with an electronic travel authorisation or with a visa on arrival, by our own count. Count rank is the passport’s position on that count alone. Shift compares the ATE rank with the count rank; a positive number means the passport does better on the ATE Index than on the count.

We code whether a citizen who voluntarily acquires another citizenship keeps this one. Allowed scores 100, restricted or case-by-case 50, and not allowed 0. The coding follows each country’s nationality law, as recorded in the GLOBALCIT Citizenship Law Dataset, with updates from more recent law texts. Vietnam, for example, is coded as restricted.

Whether a passport can be obtained by investment, and at what cost, does not change its score. Separately, the mobility durability pillar includes an indicator for how exposed citizenship-by-investment without residence is to EU visa-suspension rules.

The current edition is Edition v0, November 2026, with data retrieved on 1–2 November 2026. We plan quarterly releases, in January, April, July and October, and add updates when a major visa policy changes.

Every indicator comes from a named public source, such as the World Bank, UNDP, the IMF, the UN and the GLOBALCIT Citizenship Law Dataset; the full list is on the methodology page. Visa-requirement data are adapted from Wikipedia under CC BY-SA 4.0, and the visa-access scores derived from them are shared under the same licence. See How to cite for recommended wording.