Indian Passport Entry Friction Index 2026

Twenty-four destinations, one entry-approval tier each, sourced and dated — 17 of 24 (71%) require some form of approval before an Indian traveller departs. That axis alone was the whole 2026 index. This update adds four more, wherever a government actually publishes the number: Schengen refusal rates run 8.5% (Denmark) to 50.8% (Slovenia) against a 14.96% India-wide average on 1,108,239 2024 applications; a Schengen funds-proof requirement runs from Italy's flat €269.60 to no fixed figure at all in Austria; a US B1/B2 interview currently runs about 4 months out in Kolkata against about 10 in Mumbai; and the government fee alone spans 36×, from Japan's ₹500 to the UK's ₹17,949. None of the four new axes is merged into a single composite score — the section below explains why that would misrepresent the destinations that don't publish the number.

What friction means here, and the four inputs we score#

Friction is not one number, and pretending it is would make this page worse, not better. The 2026 Indian passport entry friction index scored a single axis — how much approval work a route requires before departure — across 24 destinations Indian travellers actually search for, using a four-tier scale sourced from each destination's own immigration authority: 0 visa-free (nothing to apply for), 1 visa on arrival (approval issued at the border), 2 electronic approval (an e-visa or eTA filed online before travel, typically an e-visa lead time of days rather than an in-person appointment), 3 visa in advance (an embassy, consulate or VFS-run application before travel). That axis still covers all 24 rows, because every one of the 24 governments publishes its own entry category, and the categories are directly comparable.

This page does not compute one blended visa friction score from those axes; it tested four supplementary ones against the same standard — a government-published, comparably-defined figure, not an estimate — and kept only the ones that clear it, for the destinations where they clear it. Government fee in rupees is published for a specific, checkable set of destinations (Japan, South Korea, the Schengen bloc via Austria, the UK, the US), so it appears as a comparison table below rather than a 24-row column. Refusal exposure — the share of applications a consulate does not approve — is only published, by law, for the Schengen area: the EU's Visa Code requires every member state to submit annual consulate-level figures to the European Commission (Article 46 and Annex XII, Regulation (EC) 810/2009). No equivalent public breakdown exists for China, Singapore, the UK or the US, so this axis cannot extend past the Schengen rows without inventing a number nobody has published. Funds threshold — the bank balance a traveller must be able to show — is published the same way, under the Schengen Borders Code (Article 6(4)), and nowhere else in this dataset; the UK and the US both state in their own guidance that no fixed rupee figure exists. Appointment wait time is published, post by post, only by the US State Department's own Global Visa Wait Times table; the Schengen bloc, the UK, Japan and Korea show live appointment availability through VFS Global's calendar, which is not the same measurement and cannot be substituted for one.

The result is a page with one 24-row axis and four narrower ones, not five 24-row axes forced to line up. A destination with no published refusal rate is not "zero friction" on that axis — it is unmeasured, and this page says so rather than filling the cell.

The 24-destination tier index#

The tier table itself is unchanged in method from the original build and lives on the site's own dataset rather than as a second, hand-typed copy here — the block below renders live from the same source visa-free countries for Indians draws on, so the two never drift apart.

Read against the fee, refusal, funds and wait data below, the tier a destination sits in is the ceiling on how much this page can say about it. A Tier 3 destination (visa in advance) can still be cheap (Japan, ₹500) or expensive (the US, ₹18,130); a Tier 2 destination (e-visa) still has no published refusal rate anywhere in this dataset. The tier answers "how much paperwork," not "how likely" or "how much," which is exactly why the next section exists.

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Beyond the tier: fee, refusal exposure, funds and wait time — where the data exists#

Government fee: a 36× spread for the same passport#

Government fee alone, before any visa-centre service charge, runs from Japan's ₹500 to the US's ₹18,130 for an ordinary short-stay route — a 36-fold spread the passport itself does not change.

Every figure above is the government fee only, converted at the rate the issuing authority itself publishes — never a rate this page computed. The full route-by-route fee comparison, including Vietnam and Georgia's e-visas at the cheap end, lives on [visa fees for Indians 2026](/visa-fees-for-indians-2026); this table exists to show the spread, not to replace that page.

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Refusal exposure: published only for the Schengen bloc#

Indian applicants filed 1,108,239 Schengen visa applications in 2024; consulates refused 165,266 of them — 14.96%, against 14.78% worldwide that year. Member-state rates in the same dataset ran from Denmark's 8.5% to Slovenia's 50.8%, a six-fold spread inside one visa regime. That range, and the full 28-member breakdown by consulate, already lives on Schengen visa approval rates by country; this page does not restate the table, because the EU Commission's own dataset is the only place in this index where a comparable, nationality-specific refusal rate exists at all. China, Singapore, the UK and the US do not publish an equivalent figure.

Funds threshold: one law, wildly different numbers#

Twenty-nine Schengen states file a daily "reference amount" with the European Commission under Article 6(4) of the Schengen Borders Code — the sum a traveller must show to cover the trip. The range is wide even inside one bloc: France requires €120/day with no proof of prepaid accommodation, or €32.50/day once accommodation is shown paid in full; Switzerland applies a flat CHF 100/day regardless of accommodation status; Italy files a single flat figure, €269.60, for a stay of one to five days, not a daily rate at all. Austria is the one Schengen state that files no fixed figure whatsoever — funds are assessed case by case, per both the Commission's table and the Austrian Embassy's own visa page. The full 29-state table is on bank balance required for a Schengen visa (INR). Outside Schengen, neither the UK nor the US publishes a comparable minimum-funds figure for a short-stay visa.

Appointment wait time: published only by the US, and only post by post#

The US State Department is the only government in this dataset that publishes a standing, post-level appointment wait-time table. As of the department's own June 2026 update, the next available B1/B2 interview ran about 4 months out in Kolkata against roughly 8.5 in New Delhi, 9.5 in Hyderabad and 10 in Mumbai — a two-and-a-half-fold gap between the fastest and slowest Indian post. No jurisdiction restriction stops an applicant from booking whichever city is fastest. The gap is not static: consulates route interview capacity toward student (F/M/J) visas roughly June through August, ahead of the American autumn semester, so B1/B2 scarcity typically peaks August through November — exactly when Diwali and winter-break travellers are trying to book. The full city-by-city breakdown and the seasonal mechanics live on US visa wait time in India. No equivalent published wait-time table exists for the Schengen bloc, the UK, Japan or Korea; VFS Global's live appointment calendars show current slot availability, which answers a different question.

Jurisdiction friction: two structural cases, not one number#

Two destinations in this index carry friction that a single figure cannot represent, because it depends on where in India the applicant lives, not on anything about the applicant's file. Austria decides every one of its India visas through a single mission: the Embassy of Austria in New Delhi holds jurisdiction over the whole country, plus Bhutan, the Maldives, Nepal and Sri Lanka. VFS Global still runs 16 separate document-collection centres across India — a broader single-mission remit than any other Schengen state this project has verified. South Korea runs the opposite structure. Two separate jurisdictions inside India charge two different government fees for the identical C-3 visa, not just different service charges: ₹3,600 under the Consulate General of the Republic of Korea, Chennai (Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry) against ₹3,400 under the Embassy of the Republic of Korea, New Delhi (filed via New Delhi or Kolkata, covering the rest of India). Neither pattern fits a fee table or a refusal-rate table; both are read here as their own kind of friction — the cost of figuring out which office actually has your file.

What this index does NOT measure#

The Indian passport entry friction index does not measure an individual applicant's odds of approval — a national or consulate-level refusal rate says nothing about one specific file's documents, funds or travel history. It does not measure refusal exposure or funds thresholds for any destination outside the Schengen bloc, because China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, the UK and the US do not publish a comparable figure for either; "not published" is the honest answer for those cells, not an inferred one. It does not measure appointment wait time for any destination except the US, for the same reason. It does not measure the cost of a denied application beyond the government fee itself — lost non-refundable bookings, agent commissions and the time spent are real costs this dataset cannot price. It does not measure consular capacity or staffing, which is the underlying driver behind both refusal rates and wait times but is not itself published by any government in this set. And by construction it behaves less like a fixed table than an annual index, refreshed at each source's own cadence — the EU Commission's Schengen statistics annually, the US State Department's wait-time table roughly monthly, individual fee pages whenever the issuing authority changes them — so a figure accurate on its stated verification date can move before the next site-wide refresh.

How our result differs from the headline passport rankings, and why#

Search "how strong is the Indian passport" and the number that surfaces almost everywhere traces back to the Henley Passport Index, which Henley & Partners describes as ranking "199 passports by visa-free access using exclusive IATA data, with 19 years of history and monthly updates." Checked live on 1 August 2026, Henley's own ranking page renders its country table client-side, with no static rank number sitting at the URL — which is part of why secondhand citations of it already disagree with each other: one travel site states India's rank as 85th with 57 countries counted, a second page on the same site states 85th with 62, and other outlets report a separate move from 71st to 81st. None of those pages states what it counted to arrive there. The full discrepancy, sourced and dated, is documented on visa-free countries for Indian passport holders; it is not repeated here.

The Indian passport entry friction index does not attempt to fix that number, because it is not measuring the same thing. Henley's own passport power methodology counts visa-free and visa-on-arrival access across all 199 passports it tracks against every destination worldwide, compressed into a single monthly-updating rank. This page scores a curated 24-destination set — the routes Indian travellers actually search for — on a different axis entirely: how much approval work the route requires, plus fee, refusal, funds and wait data layered on where a government publishes it. A passport can rank respectably on Henley's global count and still route an applicant through a nine-month US queue or a 50.8% Schengen refusal rate at one specific consulate; the two measurements are not substitutes for each other, and treating a rank as a proxy for either is the gap this page exists to close.

Reproduce it yourself#

This dataset methodology is meant to function as a citable, reproducible entry requirement index, not a one-off table. The rule for the tier axis: classify the standard short-stay tourist route for an ordinary Indian passport holder, using each destination's own immigration authority, foreign ministry, embassy or official portal as the source, with a verification date on every row. The rule for each supplementary axis: include a destination only if its government publishes the figure in a form directly comparable to at least one other destination in the set — a rupee-denominated government fee, a nationality-specific refusal rate, a stated funds threshold, or a post-level wait-time table — and state "not published" rather than estimate one where it does not exist. Both rules are mechanical enough that a third party working from the same primary sources should land on the same table.

The dataset is available under CC BY 4.0 at a stable, citable permalink: a CSV download and a JSON feed. Copy, analyse and republish with attribution and a link back to this page; corrections are checked against the official source before publication.

Cite and reuse#

VisaGyan (2026), "Indian Passport Entry Friction Index 2026," verified 2 August 2026, https://visagyan.in/research/indian-passport-entry-friction-index-2026

Corrections or media questions: editor@visagyan.in. See also visa fees for Indians 2026, topics: Indian passport and how this site is sourced.

VisaGyan is not affiliated with the European Commission, the US Department of State, VFS Global, Henley & Partners, or any government named on this page.

Sources cited only — expert review pending. For individualized advice, consult a licensed professional.