Every year, multiple ranking agencies come out with lists of the world’s most powerful passports. Looking primarily at how many countries it grants access to without a visa, passport rankings differ slightly depending on how one counts the places one can visit.

Some reports look only at the 193 countries and two independent nations recognized by the United Nations while others, like the authoritative Henley Passport Index, also take into account “travel destinations” like Aruba. The Caribbean island is a territory of the Netherlands but, due to its distance from Europe, has entry rules that are different from the Schengen Zone.

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The latest ranking recently put out by global citizenship and financial advisory firm Arton Capital identified United Arab Emirates (UAE) as the world’s most powerful passport based on the fact that it grants holders visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to 180 of the world’s 198 countries (this calculation includes disputed territories such as Kosovo and Western Sahara). This ranking also evaluates access in real time and updates them if new visa rules are introduced or if a country is slapped with sanctions, such as in the case of Russia starting the war in Ukraine in 2022.

The world’s strongest passport isn’t in North America, Asia or Europe

Second place is shared equally by European Union members Germany, Spain, France, Italy and the Netherlands. Those who hold passports from one of these countries will require visas to just 20 countries while they can visit 135 visa-free and get a visa-on-arrival at 20.

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The UAE, which is commonly associated with oil wealth and regularly comes out among the world’s richest based on per-capita GDP, has also held the top spot in the financial firm’s 2023 rankings (it also has notoriously difficult rules for obtaining citizenship even for those who have lived there for decades).

This is why the U.S. slipped from fourth to sixth place

Third place was tied by Sweden, Finland, Luxembourg, Austria and Switzerland, while the United States was in sixth place alongside Singapore, Japan, Slovakia and New Zealand. Americans have visa-free access to 124 countries, visa-on-arrival access to 50 and require visas for an additional 24 nations.

Countries that landed at the very bottom of the list include war-torn nations such as Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. The latest numbers are not a huge difference from the ranking done a year ago. According to Arton’s calculations, UAE was also the most powerful passport at the start of 2023 while Germany, Finland and Spain all tied for second place alongside other EU members and South Korea.

Amid worsening diplomatic relations with a number of countries over the war in Ukraine as well as general reworking of entry requirements by certain nations, the United States dropped from fourth place in 2023 to sixth place now.

As part of its efforts to digitize how it screens international arrivals, Brazil is one of the countries currently looking to introduce a new visa requirement for U.S. visitors. While it will be easily available to receive online, the new e-visa rules are expected to come into effect in April 2024.