Passports come in all colours and sizes, rankings and designs; but it is also important to note that the cost of obtaining a passport also defers one from the next.

SavingSpot has gone through the number crunching and produced some interesting headline results. At $74USD, the mean price of the passport does not actually fluctuate that significantly around the world and across the developed countries.

Table showing the least affordable passports in the world

Using the January 2021 US dollar exchange rates, SavingSpot pored through the available data for each country to find the prices for each country.

Where passports were offered in different sizes (number of pages) and expiration dates, the option of the fewest pages and longest validity was chosen. At a whopping $800, Syria has by far most expensive passports.

Affordability of the passport

Key to the study is also the affordability factor for each country. Of course, a dollar in North America is not the same as a dollar in central Africa. So to compile the affordability the average hourly wage was taken into consideration to express the price of the passport in terms of hours worked.

Topping the list is Malawi whose $118 passport would require over 983 hours of work in order to buy the passport.

Affordability of passports in Asia and Oceania

On the opposite end of the spectrum Madagascar has the world’s cheapest and most affordable passport — free.

European numbers are much more stable, with nearly all EU Member States requiring under ten hours of work for their passports, Romania being the sole exception. This is in some ways a little misleading because many EU Citizens do not have passports as they are permitted to travel to other EU countries using solely their national ID cards, which often cost far less than passports.