ABU DHABI (The Thursday Times) — The UAE closed out a strong year on the global rankings table in 2026, topping the Arton Capital Passport Index as the world’s most powerful passport, taking the top spot on Numbeo’s global safety index for Abu Dhabi, and placing first in the Arab world on the World Happiness Report — a rare clean sweep across travel, safety and wellbeing indices in the same year.
The passport ranking carries the most practical weight for ordinary Emiratis and residents travelling on UAE documents. Arton Capital’s 2026 index gave the UAE a global mobility score of 182, the highest figure the index has recorded for any country since it began, edging out Singapore’s score of 175 for the top position.
From visa-dependent to visa-free
The scale of the shift is easy to understate. As recently as the early 2010s, UAE passport holders needed visas for the large majority of the world’s countries; the 2026 ranking reflects a run of bilateral visa-waiver agreements built up steadily over more than a decade, rather than a single diplomatic breakthrough.
“The UAE’s passport strength reflects years of sustained diplomatic engagement and the trust the country has built internationally,” Arton Capital said in releasing the 2026 index.
The safety numbers tell a parallel story. Numbeo’s 2026 index, which scores 400 cities worldwide on crime perception and personal security, placed Abu Dhabi first globally with a safety score of 88.9 — among the highest readings the index has produced for any city — while Sharjah ranked fifth and Dubai sixth, giving the UAE three cities inside the global top six.
Happiness, measured differently
The UAE also placed 21st in the World Happiness Report 2026, first among Arab countries and ahead of both the United States (23rd) and the United Kingdom (29th). The report’s methodology leans heavily on how people evaluate their own lives rather than purely economic indicators, which makes the UAE’s placement — a country built in large part on a resident workforce without full citizenship rights — a more contested, if still notable, data point than the passport and safety rankings.
Soft power, compounding
Individually, none of these rankings is new territory for the UAE — the passport has topped or near-topped global indices for several years running, and Abu Dhabi has featured near the top of safety rankings before. What makes 2026 notable is the overlap: a country rarely tops indices for mobility, safety and wellbeing in the same cycle, since the policies that drive each tend to pull in different directions. A state that scores well on safety, in particular, is not usually also the one with the most liberal visa regime.
That the UAE is doing both at once is, officials argue, the point of the broader national strategy: a country positioning itself simultaneously as an easy place to leave from, an easy place to arrive in, and a safe place to stay.∎
