Guides tell you whether a visa is required. This page answers the second question: will you get it. We unpacked the European Commission's official 2025 statistics across 118 filing countries and every “country → Schengen state” pair. The Schengen-wide average is 14.5%.
Sorted by refusal share. Only countries with at least 1,000 applications in the year are ranked — below that the percentage swings wildly. Click a row to open that country’s busiest route.
The European Commission (DG HOME) publishes yearly statistics for every Schengen consulate worldwide: applications filed, visas issued and refusals.
The source is a fifteen-hundred-row spreadsheet. We aggregate consulates by filing country and lay the data out per “filing country → Schengen state” pair, so the number shows up on the page for your exact route.
The strictness rank, the deviation from the Schengen average and the 1,000-application threshold are our own calculations on top of the official figures, not Commission data.
A limitation we state openly: the Commission counts applications by where they were filed, not by the applicant's nationality — applications by other nationals at the same consulate fall into the same row. And a refusal rate is an average: it does not account for your travel purpose, visa history or how complete your documents are. Source — European Commission, DG HOME
We did the work of collecting and unpacking these figures — and we give them away. Use them in articles, research and your own products: the only condition is a link back to the source.
Data source: VISAXS (https://visaxs.com/schengen-refusals), licensed under CC BY 4.0
<a href="https://visaxs.com/schengen-refusals">VISAXS</a> — licensed under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY 4.0</a>
Licence: CC BY 4.0 — copy, adapt and use commercially, as long as you credit the source.
We follow the same rule ourselves. Underlying source: European Commission, DG HOME — Visa statistics for consulates (licence Decision 2011/833/EU). The derived calculations, classification and pairwise breakdown are ours.
According to European Commission data for 2025, the average refusal rate is 14.5% — roughly one in 7 applications is turned down. The spread between countries is enormous, from a few percent to more than half of all applications.
The highest refusal rate is at consulates located in Bangladesh: 54.1% of applications refused across 38,642 filed.
It is the share of visas not issued out of applications filed: refusals divided by applications. The Commission publishes per-consulate figures; we aggregate them by filing country and by the pair “filing country → Schengen state”.
By filing country. The Commission counts applications at consulates — for example every application filed at consulates located in Uzbekistan. For most countries this closely tracks the applicants' nationality, but it is not identical to it.
Yes, noticeably: the same filing country can face very different refusal rates at consulates of different Schengen states. Open a specific pair page to see the figures for your exact route.