On July 16, global immigration consulting firm Henley & Partners unveiled its highly anticipated 2026 Henley Passport Index, the annual ranking that measures global travel freedom across 199 national passports. In this latest edition, Belize has secured the 50th spot, marking a slight but notable improvement from its performance in recent years. The index’s methodology is built on a straightforward, data-driven framework: every passport is evaluated against 227 global travel destinations, earning one point for each destination that allows entry without a pre-departure visa. This includes destinations offering visa-free access, visas on arrival, visitor permits, and electronic travel authorizations, while destinations that require advance visas contribute no points to a passport’s total. The cumulative point total, called the global access score, determines a passport’s ranking, and passports with identical scores share the same position.
For Belize, the 2026 results bring a global access score of 100, meaning Belizean passport holders can now travel to 100 destinations across the world without arranging a visa before leaving the country. This places the Central American nation firmly in the middle tier of this year’s ranking, alongside other passports with matching access scores. Topping the 2026 index is Singapore, which boasts an impressive 192 visa-free destinations, retaining its position as the world’s most travel-friendly passport.
A deeper look into the index’s two decades of historical data reveals a long-term trend of gradual decline for Belize’s passport ranking, punctuated by small recent gains that have pulled it back up from historic lows. Between 2006 and 2009, Belize held a steady 42nd place globally, a strong position that it lost in 2010 when it fell to 50th. The country dropped further to 53rd in both 2011 and 2012, before a short-lived recovery pushed it up to 46th in 2013 and 44th in 2014. That upward momentum ended abruptly in 2015, when Belize plummeted to 56th place. For most of the next 10 years, Belize remained stuck in the mid-50s, hitting its all-time lowest ranking of 59th in 2021 amid broader global shifts in travel visa policies.
Since hitting that low point in 2021, however, Belize has charted a slow but consistent upward trajectory. The country moved up two spots to 52nd in 2022, before slipping back to 54th for both 2023 and 2024. It climbed again to 49th in the 2025 edition of the index, before settling at 50th in the 2026 release. While the latest one-spot drop from 2025 is a minor shift, the overall trend over the past four years shows a clear recovery from the 2021 low, giving Belize a stronger position in global travel freedom than it has had in a decade.