Refusal rates for tourist and business visas across 197 nationalities — and, more importantly, which way they are moving. Year over year refusals rose for 141 countries and fell for 53. Median: 31.3%.
Sorted by refusal rate. The right-hand column is the change from the previous fiscal year in percentage points. Click a row to open the “country → United States” pair page.
The US State Department publishes a yearly table of adjusted B-visa refusal rates for every nationality — the metric used when assessing countries for the Visa Waiver Program.
We parsed the FY2024 and FY2025 tables 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 State Department data.
Limitations: the metric covers only B-1/B-2 visas — student, work and immigrant categories are excluded. For countries with few applicants 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/us-visa-refusals), licensed under CC BY 4.0
<a href="https://visaxs.com/us-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: U.S. Department of State — Adjusted Refusal Rate, B-Visas by Nationality (licence U.S. Government Work). The derived calculations, classification and pairwise breakdown are ours.
It is a US State Department metric maintained for the Visa Waiver Program. It covers B-1/B-2 visas — tourism and business travel — and excludes student, work and immigrant visas.
The median across all 197 nationalities in FY2025 is 31.3%. 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 141 of 197 countries and fell for 53. The sharpest rise was Micronesia: from 0% to 100%.
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”.