Refusal rates for tourist and business visas across 119 nationalities — and, more importantly, which way they are moving. Year over year refusals rose for 89 countries and fell for 30. Median: 27.7%.
Sorted by refusal rate. The right-hand column is the change from the previous year in percentage points. Click a row to open the “country → United Kingdom” pair page.
The Home Office publishes the outcome of every visa application quarterly: issued and refused, broken down by nationality and visa type. We take visitor visas and aggregate quarters into years.
We parsed the 2024 and 2025 data and joined them. That comparison produces what the original publications do not contain: the direction of travel for each country.
The year-over-year delta in percentage points, the strictness rank and the all-country median are our own calculations on top of the official figures, not Home Office data.
An important caveat about visa-free countries: citizens of the US, Germany, Italy and others do not need a visa for a short trip — they travel on an ETA. Visitor-visa applications from them are few and typically non-standard, so their refusal share looks high and swings sharply. It is not comparable with visa-national countries. Limitations: the metric covers visitor visas only — study, work and family routes are counted separately. For countries with few applications the percentage swings year to year because of small numbers, not policy changes. And a refusal rate is an average: it says nothing about your particular application, travel purpose or travel history.
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/uk-visa-refusals), licensed under CC BY 4.0
<a href="https://visaxs.com/uk-visa-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: UK Home Office — Entry clearance visa applications and outcomes (licence Open Government Licence v3.0). The derived calculations, classification and pairwise breakdown are ours.
Visitor visas: tourism, visiting family and friends, and business trips. Study, work and family routes are counted separately by the Home Office and are not included. These are applications made from outside the UK.
The median across all 119 nationalities in 2025 is 27.7%. Half the countries are refused less often than that, half more. The spread is enormous — from a fraction of a percent to over 80%.
Year over year the refusal rate rose for 89 of 119 countries and fell for 30. The sharpest rise was Kazakhstan: from 23.8% to 34.07%.
Small countries file only a handful of applications, so one or two refusals move the percentage by tens of points. That is an artefact of small numbers, not a policy shift. Read such values with the country's size in mind.
By nationality — unlike the Schengen statistics, which the European Commission keeps per consulate. So you can read this figure directly as “the odds for a holder of this passport”.