5 Countries That Let Everybody In

An Afghan passport gets you into 20 countries and territories without a visa in advance. An Emirati passport gets you into 170. That gap is the usual story, and it is true. But it hides a smaller, more useful fact. There are five places that make nobody get a visa before flying. Not the strongest passport, not the weakest. Nobody.

We went through every passport in the Edenpax dataset, 199 of them against 198 destinations each, to find the doors that stay open even for the passports with the fewest options.

TL;DR

• Five countries and territories let all 199 passports in without a visa in advance: Comoros, Micronesia, Samoa, Timor-Leste and Tuvalu. The Maldives would make six, but it has refused entry on Israeli passports since April 2025.
• Add the Maldives, Dominica, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya and Rwanda and you get ten places open to every one of the 21 passports with the fewest no-visa options.
• For those passports, e-visas matter more than visa-free deals. A Pakistani passport has 50 e-visa destinations and 27 with no visa needed in advance.
• "Open" means no visa in advance. It does not mean no paperwork. Most of the five ask for a return or onward ticket, proof you can pay your way, or both.
• Check each trip on the Passport page for your own passport before you book.

The five that ask nobody

Here is the short list. In our data, all 199 passports get visa-free entry, a visa on arrival or a visitor permit at the border in these five.

Timor-Leste. Asia's youngest country is also one of its most open. Travellers of all nationalities can get a tourist visa on arrival, valid for 30 days and extendable once. Bring evidence of money: tourist visa entrants need US$100 for each entry and US$50 for each day of the stay, unless someone in the country sponsors them. Your passport must be valid for at least six months. Here is how it looks from Afghanistan to Timor-Leste.

Samoa. Visitors apply for a 90-day Visitor Permit on arrival, using the arrival card. You need a passport valid for at least six months beyond your stay, a confirmed return or onward ticket, any visa needed for your next country, enough money to support yourself in Samoa and a confirmed address. Work is not allowed on a Visitor Permit.

Micronesia. No visa is needed for the Federated States of Micronesia. A valid passport, enough money and proof of onward travel are enough for 30 days. Divers come for the Second World War wrecks in Chuuk Lagoon. The paperwork is not the hard part.

Tuvalu. Every passport in our data shows a visitor permit or visa on arrival. Under Tuvalu's rules, the Principal Immigration Officer may issue a visitor permit to any visitor for up to 30 days. That is the officer's decision, not an automatic right. Citizens of 42 listed countries and territories, including Malaysia, the United Kingdom, Kenya and Fiji, pay no fee. Everyone else pays $100 unless the Minister waives it. The permit can be extended by up to 30 days for another $100. It does not allow work, business, study or proselytising, and every arrival fills in an arrival card. Hardly anyone takes up the offer: Tuvalu recorded 3,136 visitors in the whole of 2023.

Comoros. The islands between Mozambique and Madagascar show a visa on arrival for every passport in our data. The national tourism office says visitors of every nationality can get one at the main airports and ports, for up to 45 days and renewable. It asks for a passport valid for more than six months and a return or onward ticket, and gives a fee of roughly €30 to €50. The national police, who run the visa service, put it more narrowly. Their page says arrival visas at Moroni airport are for citizens of countries with no Comorian embassy or consulate, and asks for a valid passport, a return ticket and an address for your stay. If your country has a Comorian embassy, check with it before you fly.

None of these is a cheap weekend from most of the world. That is the honest catch. The places that let everyone in are often small, remote and hard to reach. Open borders and short flights rarely go together.

The one that dropped off the list

The Maldives would have made it six. It is the one most people have heard of, and for 198 of the 199 passports in our data it still asks for no visa in advance. Tourist visas are granted on arrival, with no pre-approval. The exception is Israel. Parliament amended the Maldives Immigration Act in April 2025, the president ratified it the same day, and since 15 April 2025 entry has not been granted on Israeli passports. The ban covers the passport, not the person, so a dual national can still enter on another passport.

For everyone else the conditions are real. You need a confirmed return ticket, a prepaid booking at a registered place to stay, enough money for the trip and a passport with a machine-readable zone. Every traveller has to submit the free IMUGA Traveller Declaration in the 96 hours before arrival. Do that, and the paperwork is done before you land. See Bangladesh to the Maldives for one example.

Five more for the passports with the fewest options

In our data, 21 passports reach 40 or fewer destinations with no visa in advance. All eight passports at the bottom of the Henley Passport Index, October 2026 edition, are among them:

• Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and Pakistan
• Somalia, Bangladesh, Yemen and Nepal
• North Korea, Iran, Palestine and Eritrea
• Sri Lanka, Libya, Sudan and South Sudan
• Ethiopia, Lebanon, Nigeria, DR Congo and Myanmar

Every one of them can reach the five places above, and five more:

• The Maldives, on arrival. Israel is the only passport in our data it turns away, and Israel is not in this group.
• Kenya, through its electronic travel authorisation. It is an online form you complete before you fly, not an embassy visa. See Nigeria to Kenya.
• Rwanda, visa-free or with a visa on arrival, depending on the passport.
• Dominica, visa-free for every one of the 21.
• Guinea-Bissau, mostly on arrival.

That makes ten countries and territories open to all 21 without an embassy visit. Close behind are Madagascar and Seychelles, open to 20 of the 21, then Burundi and Palau (19 each), Haiti (18), Cambodia and Sri Lanka (17 each) and Macau (16).

What it costs to get there

Open entry is only half a holiday. We looked up four routes in the Edenpax flight search on 13 November 2026, cheapest one-way fare in December 2026:

• Dhaka to Malé: from US$239 one way, on 5 December.
• Kathmandu to Malé: from US$237 one way, on 23 December. Entry rules: Nepal to the Maldives.
• Karachi to Malé: from PKR 102,622 (about US$370) one way, on 28 December, one stop via Sharjah. Entry rules: Pakistan to the Maldives.
• Lagos to Nairobi: from US$419 one way, on 30 December.

Fares move by the hour, so treat these as a snapshot, not a promise. Run your own dates on Flights, and the entry status for your passport shows beside the price.

For these passports, the laptop beats the border

The most useful number in this story is not the visa-free count. It is the e-visa count.

For passports with few no-visa options, an online application now opens more doors than the border does. In our data:

A Pakistani passport holder has nearly twice as many e-visa destinations as places with no visa needed at all. An e-visa still costs money and still needs approval. But it is a form, a fee and a wait at home, not a morning outside a consulate with a folder of bank statements. If you hold one of these passports, the question to ask is not "where is visa-free?" It is "where can I apply from my sofa?"

Open is not the same as easy

Three things trip people up.

Airlines check before the border does. An airline can refuse to board you if your documents do not match the destination's rules. Return tickets and proof of a booking or an address come up again and again in the conditions above, and they are exactly what a check-in desk will ask for.

Transit can be the real visa. Getting to Samoa or Tuvalu usually means changing planes somewhere else, and that stopover country has its own rules for your passport. A visa-free destination behind a visa-required transit hub is not a visa-free trip.

Rules change. Thailand revised its visa exemption and visa on arrival schemes in 2026. Others will move too. If you are planning months out, save the trip in Edenpax and switch on alerts in your account, so a rule change reaches you before your check-in does.

How we counted

We used the Edenpax visa-requirement dataset as stored on 11 November 2026: 199 passports, each checked against 198 destinations. We counted a destination as "no visa in advance" when the status is visa-free, visa on arrival or an electronic travel authorisation. E-visas are a separate count. Anything listed as visa required or no admission counts as an embassy visa or closed. A small number of rows with mixed or unclear statuses are left out of all three.

About a third of the rows in the dataset come from official government sources that our team has reviewed, and the rest come from third-party tables. The entry conditions described in this article come from official pages. For anything else, treat the status as a starting point and check the official source linked on each Edenpax pair page.

Look up your own passport on the Passport page, or colour the whole picture on the World Map.