US drops out of world’s most powerful passport top 10 list for the first time

What makes a passport “powerful”? Well, a clear measure is travel openness, the ability to slip into destinations around the world with a breezy wave of your passport, no visa required.

The Henley Passport Index is one of several rankings measuring passport potency in this regard and, for the first time in its 20-year history, the US passport has fallen out of its top 10 list altogether.

Three Asian passports now command the top of the leaderboard: Singapore, with visa-free access to 193 destinations worldwide; South Korea, with access to 190; and Japan, with 189.

The United States, meanwhile, is down in 12th place in the latest quarterly ranking, tied with Malaysia.

Citizens of both nations enjoy visa-free access to 180 of the 227 countries and territories tracked by the index, which was created by the London-based global citizenship and residence advisory firm Henley & Partners, and uses exclusive data from the International Air Transport Association. And because Henley counts multiple countries with the same score as a single spot in its standings, there are actually 36 countries that outrank the US on the list.