The complete list of all 195 countries, organized by region

There are 195 countries in the world. That number — not 193, not 197, not 206 — is the one most travelers use, the one most country-counting websites use, and the one we use on My Travel Maps. It is the 193 member states of the United Nations plus the Vatican City and the State of Palestine, which are the two non-member observer states. We explain where the number comes from in detail in our companion piece on how many countries are there in the world; this article is the part you actually need next, which is the list itself.

If you sit down with a world map and start ticking countries off, what you want is the names spelled the way they are actually spelled, the capitals so you can tell Niger from Nigeria and Dominica from the Dominican Republic, and a quick note on the ones that are unusually hard to get into, the ones that recently changed names, and the ones that look like one country on the map but are technically two. That is what this guide is for. It is the reference page we wish had existed when we built the tool.

We have organized the 195 countries the way most travelers think about them — by continent, with the count for each region clearly marked. The grouping is the conventional one: 54 in Africa, 48 in Asia, 44 in Europe, 23 in North America, 12 in South America, and 14 in Oceania. The transcontinental cases (Russia, Turkey, Egypt, the Caucasus) are placed where the United Nations Statistics Division places them, and we explain the alternatives at the end. Inside each region, the list is alphabetical.

Where the number 195 comes from

The 195 figure has a clean derivation. Start with the 193 member states of the United Nations General Assembly — the uncontested baseline that essentially every government, dictionary, and atlas accepts.^[1]Then add the two states that the UN itself recognizes as “non-member observer states.” The first is the Holy See / Vatican City, which has held permanent observer status since 1964 and which the UN treats as a state in everything but name.^[2] The second is the State of Palestine, which was upgraded from observer entity to non-member observer state by General Assembly Resolution 67/19 in November 2012.^[3]

193 + 2 = 195. That is the list. It excludes Taiwan, Kosovo, Western Sahara, Northern Cyprus, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria, Somaliland, and every other partially-recognized or unrecognized state, because none of them is a UN member or observer. Travelers who want a longer list often add some of those — the Travelers' Century Club, for example, counts about 330 entries by including dependencies and isolated regions^[4] — but 195 is the cleanest, most defensible number for someone marking “countries visited” on a map. We discuss the partial-recognition cases in our piece on Kosovo, Taiwan, and Palestine.

How to use this list with your map

The intended workflow is simple. Open the list, scroll through your most-likely region, find the countries you have actually visited, and then go to mytravelmaps.org/countries-visited-map to mark them on the actual map. The map uses the same 195 baseline this article does, so the lists line up one-to-one. If you want to know what “visited” means in the strict sense — does an airport transit count? a port stop on a cruise? — we cover that question in painful detail in what counts as visiting a country. The short version is that we recommend the left-the-airport rule: if you cleared passport control and set foot on the ground outside the airport perimeter, it counts. Anything stricter is a personal choice.

A note on the “notes” column: it is intentionally terse. We have only added a note where there is something worth knowing — a hard visa, a recent name change, a security advisory, a quirk most travelers do not know about. Countries with no note are essentially uncomplicated for most passport holders. Visa difficulty is given for the general case (most Western and Asian passports). If you hold a passport from a country with a more restricted travel document, your experience may be different — consult the foreign ministry of the destination directly.

The 195 countries on a map

Africa (54 countries)

Africa is the largest region by country count — more than a quarter of the entire UN membership sits on the African continent. It is also, for most travelers, the hardest region to complete. Visa policies are uneven, regional security situations change quickly, and several countries have very limited tourist infrastructure. Cabo Verde, the Gambia, Mauritius, Morocco, Namibia, Senegal, the Seychelles, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zambia are comfortable, well-trodden entry points; Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Libya, Somalia, South Sudan, and Sudan are at the opposite end of the spectrum and effectively closed to casual tourism for most of the year.

Asia (48 countries)

Asia is the second-largest region and is the heart of most serious travelers' country-counting efforts. The continent contains both the easiest entries on the planet (Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, the UAE, Maldives) and some of the hardest (Turkmenistan, North Korea, Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan). Saudi Arabia is the big recent change: it launched a tourist e-Visa in September 2019 and went, almost overnight, from one of the most difficult countries to visit to one of the easiest.^[5] Note that Cyprus is listed here under Asia because the UN Statistics Division places it in Western Asia, even though it is an EU member and is “in Europe” by every cultural and political measure most travelers use.

Europe (44 countries)

Europe is the most accessible region on Earth for almost every traveler. The Schengen Area lets you cross 29 borders with no passport check at all, the European Union creates a common visa policy that covers most short-stay tourism, and even the non-Schengen, non-EU European states (the UK, Ireland, the Balkans, the microstates) are open to most passport holders. The exceptions are Russia and Belarus, which have politically driven visa restrictions and deteriorating travel advisories. Note that Vatican City is counted here even though it has no border controls — it is a UN observer state and part of the standard 195. We have a separate piece on the difference between Schengen, the EU, and Europe for travelers who get those tangled.

North America (23 countries)

North America in the geographic sense includes Canada, the United States, Mexico, all of Central America, and the Caribbean. Almost every country in the region is open to visa-free or visa-on-arrival travel for most Western and Asian passport holders, with two practical complications: Cuba (which still requires a tourist card and has special rules for US travelers), and Haiti (which has been under severe security advisories since 2024). The Caribbean contains the highest density of small island states in the world — eight of the region's 23 countries are Caribbean islands with populations under one million.

South America (12 countries)

South America is the easiest continent on the planet to complete. Twelve countries, all but one of which are visa-free or use a simple e-Visa for most Western passports, all geographically connected, and most of them on roughly compatible bus and air networks. A determined traveler can hit every South American country in a single long trip — many backpackers do exactly that. The two things to know: Venezuela has been politically and economically difficult since the late 2010s, and Brazil reintroduced visa requirements (as an e-Visa) for US, Canadian, and Australian travelers in April 2025.^[6]

Oceania (14 countries)

Oceania is the smallest region by country count and the most logistically expensive to complete. Fourteen countries, twelve of which are small Pacific island states spread across roughly 30 million square kilometers of ocean. Australia and New Zealand are easy and well-served; Fiji is a regional hub with frequent flights; the rest are a serious project. Nauru and Tuvalu are routinely cited as the two least-visited sovereign states on Earth — Tuvalu receives roughly 3,000 tourists a year, Nauru fewer.^[7] Hitting all 14 typically requires using Fiji Airways, Air Niugini, Solomon Airlines, and the United Island Hopper (a multi-stop turboprop route run by United Airlines from Honolulu to Guam, stopping in the Marshalls, Kosrae, Pohnpei, and Chuuk).

Transcontinental cases: where do Russia, Turkey, and the Caucasus actually go?

A handful of countries straddle conventional continental boundaries, and there is no single “correct” answer for which continent they belong to. Different atlases and data sources place them differently, which is one of the most common reasons two travel-tracking apps will give you slightly different counts even when you have visited the same set of countries. The five real ambiguities are:

• Russia. About 77 percent of Russian territory is in Asia, but about 78 percent of the population lives in European Russia, including Moscow and Saint Petersburg. The standard travelers' convention — and the one we use on this list — is to count Russia as European, since that is where the cultural, political, and demographic center of gravity sits. Many statistical sources do the same; the UN geoscheme places Russia in Eastern Europe.
• Turkey. About 97 percent of Turkey's land area is in Asia (Anatolia); roughly three percent (Eastern Thrace, including the European side of Istanbul) is in Europe. Turkey is overwhelmingly categorized as Asian by geographers and by the UN geoscheme, so we list it under Asia. Travelers who visited only Istanbul technically have feet in both continents; we count it as one country.
• Cyprus. Geographically Cyprus is in Asia (Western Asia / the Levant). Politically it is in the European Union and is treated as a European country in almost every cultural sense. The UN places it in Asia, so we do too — but if your intuition says “that's a European country,” you are not wrong, you are just using a different convention.
• Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia. The South Caucasus is geographically Asian by the most common definition (the Greater Caucasus mountains as the Europe-Asia divide). Culturally and historically the three states have strong European ties — Armenia and Georgia in particular think of themselves as European, and all three participate in the Council of Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest. We list them under Asia, in line with the UN geoscheme.
• Egypt. Egypt is in Africa geographically, but the Sinai Peninsula is in Asia. The UN places Egypt firmly in Africa (Northern Africa subregion), and we follow that.

The point of all this: if you compare your country count to a friend's and the totals match but the per-continent breakdowns do not, this is usually why. The underlying countries are the same; the buckets are conventional, not absolute. Pick a convention and stick with it.

The 15 countries travelers usually skip (and why)

For most people working their way through the 195, the first 100 countries are easy and the last 50 are an escalating sequence of obstacles. The countries below are the ones that consistently appear at the end of completionists' lists — not because they are uninteresting, but because they are some combination of dangerous, expensive, bureaucratically difficult, or structurally hard to reach.

1. Turkmenistan. Famously the hardest tourist visa in the world. Independent travel is essentially impossible; you need a Letter of Invitation from a registered local agency, and you must travel with a state-licensed guide. Tourist visas are routinely denied without explanation.
2. North Korea. Not currently issuing tourist visas at all (the borders closed in early 2020 and have only partially reopened to a handful of group tours). When tourism does resume, it is group-only, guide-mandatory, and politically sensitive.
3. Equatorial Guinea. One of the most arbitrary tourist visa systems on the planet. Many applications are simply ignored; even the embassies that do process them often require an in-person interview in a third country.
4. Eritrea. Tourist visas are obtainable but require a Travel Permit for nearly every destination outside the capital, Asmara. Permits can take weeks and are often denied for no stated reason.
5. Libya. Effectively closed to casual tourism since the 2011 civil war. A handful of agencies run guided tours into specific regions (Leptis Magna, Sabratha) but obtaining the visa requires sponsorship.
6. Yemen. Active conflict; do-not-travel advisories from essentially every Western government. The island of Socotra is sometimes accessible via chartered flights, but mainland Yemen is not a realistic destination.
7. Somalia. Mogadishu is reachable on a handful of guided security tours, but most of the country is not. Somaliland (the separatist northern region centered on Hargeisa) is a separate de facto state and is accessible with its own visa, though it does not count as a separate country in the 195 list.
8. Syria. Visas are difficult to obtain and security advisories remain in place across most of the country. A few specialized tour operators run trips to Damascus, Palmyra, and Aleppo, but spontaneous travel is not possible.
9. Afghanistan. The Taliban government does issue tourist visas, and a handful of operators run trips to Kabul, Bamyan, and Herat, but every Western government advises against all travel.
10. Central African Republic. Active conflict outside the capital, Bangui. Independent travel is impractical and rarely advised.
11. Chad. Visa required, security advisories in place, very limited tourist infrastructure outside N'Djamena.
12. Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger. The three Sahel coup states have all seen their security situations deteriorate sharply since 2020, and most embassies advise against travel outside the capitals.
13. Nauru. Logistically very hard to reach. Roughly one or two flights a week, almost all from Brisbane via Honiara, and the country's tourist infrastructure is essentially the airport hotel.
14. Tuvalu. Three flights a week from Fiji, and the runway doubles as the country's most popular evening hangout. Reaching it is a project; staying there is straightforward.
15. Bhutan. Not difficult logistically, but the Sustainable Development Fee of roughly USD 100 per day per traveler makes it the most expensive country in the 195 to visit on a per-day basis. (Many consider this money well spent; we mention it only because it is the usual reason Bhutan ends up at the back of the queue.)

We will be writing a much longer piece on the 10 hardest countries to visit in 2026 (and how to actually get into them) as the next post in this series, so we will not go deeper here. The point of the list above is just to flag which countries you should expect to be difficult, so you can plan accordingly when building toward 195.

The 30 countries travelers usually visit first

The other end of the spectrum is just as predictable. Almost every traveler hits roughly the same first 25 to 30 countries before they start branching out into more obscure destinations. There is nothing wrong with this — the well-trodden countries are well-trodden for good reasons — but it is useful to know what the “default” set looks like, both as a sanity check on your map and as a reminder of what you are missing.

The conventional first 30, in roughly the order they appear on most travelers' maps:

1. The home country (whatever that is — this is country number one for almost everybody).
2. The neighbors of the home country (typically two to four).
3. France — the world's most-visited country by tourist arrivals.
4. Spain — second most-visited.
5. Italy — the third leg of the European triangle.
6. United Kingdom — anglophone gateway.
7. Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium — the Central European core.
8. Greece and Portugal — the Mediterranean shoulders.
9. Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Croatia — the Central European second wave.
10. United States — for non-Americans.
11. Canada — typically combined with the US.
12. Mexico — Cancun, Yucatán, Mexico City.
13. Thailand — the most popular Asian entry point for Western travelers.
14. Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos — the Indochina loop.
15. Japan — the second Asian wave.
16. Singapore — frequent stopover.
17. Indonesia (almost always Bali first).
18. Malaysia — typically combined with Singapore and Thailand.
19. India — for the more adventurous.
20. UAE — Dubai stopover.
21. Turkey — Istanbul, the Aegean coast, Cappadocia.
22. Egypt — pyramids and Nile cruises.
23. Morocco — Marrakech and the Atlas.
24. South Africa — typically the first African country for English-speaking travelers.

That is roughly 30 countries. If your map has 25 of the above filled in and 165 empty, congratulations — you are completely typical. The interesting question is what the 31st through 60th look like, and that depends on whether you are an island-state collector, a Balkans completionist, a Central Asia loop traveler, a Pacific microstate-chaser, or a West African overland adventurer. Each of those routes is its own future post; the central point is that after the first 30 the path diverges, and your map starts looking different from everyone else's.

Frequently asked questions

Why is Vatican City on the list but not Kosovo or Taiwan?

Vatican City is on the list because the United Nations formally recognizes it as a non-member observer state, the same status held by Palestine. Kosovo and Taiwan are not on the list because neither holds UN membership or observer status — Kosovo's 2008 declaration of independence has been recognized by about half of UN members but has never advanced to a UN seat, and Taiwan's seat was transferred to the People's Republic of China in 1971. Many travelers count one or both anyway; we explain the full background in our piece on disputed countries.

Is there an “official” list of the 195?

There is no single document titled “the 195 countries.” The 193 UN member states are authoritative — the UN publishes the list at un.org/en/about-us/member-states. The two observer states (Vatican, Palestine) are also documented by the UN. Adding the two to the 193 is an informal but near-universal travelers' convention.

Why does my travel app say I have visited fewer countries than this list says exist?

Two possibilities. Either the app uses a smaller baseline (193 UN members only, excluding the Vatican and Palestine), or it uses a different rule for what counts as “visited” (some apps require an overnight stay, others a passport stamp). My Travel Maps uses the 195 baseline and the “left the airport” rule; you can read more in what counts as visiting a country.

Is the United Kingdom one country or four?

One. The UK is a single sovereign state; England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are constituent countries inside it but do not hold UN seats and do not appear on the 195 list. Travelers who want to track them separately usually use a more granular system like NomadMania's 1,301 regions or the Travelers' Century Club's ~330 territories.

Why is Greenland not on the list?

Greenland is a constituent country of the Kingdom of Denmark, not a sovereign state. It has its own government, parliament, and language, and runs essentially all of its own internal affairs, but its foreign relations are still handled through Copenhagen. It does not hold a UN seat. If you visit Greenland, you have visited Denmark in the country-counting sense.

What about Hong Kong, Macau, and Puerto Rico?

None of them are on the 195 list. Hong Kong and Macau are Special Administrative Regions of the People's Republic of China; visiting them counts as visiting China. Puerto Rico is an unincorporated territory of the United States; visiting it counts as visiting the US. The Travelers' Century Club counts all three separately, which is one of the reasons their list runs to about 330 entries instead of 195.

Has the list of 195 ever changed?

Yes, several times. South Sudan was added when it joined the UN in 2011, Montenegro was added when it joined in 2006, Timor-Leste in 2002, Switzerland (which had not previously been a member) in 2002, Eritrea in 1993, Czechoslovakia split into two members in 1993, Yugoslavia dissolved into multiple states between 1991 and 2008, the Soviet Union dissolved into 15 in 1991, and so on. Anyone counting countries over a long enough horizon eventually has to deal with a country that did not exist when they first started traveling — a topic we cover in the next post in this series.

Why is the order “alphabetical” instead of by population or area?

Alphabetical order is the easiest to scan for the actual use case (looking up a specific country to check it off). Sorting by population would surface China and India at the top, which is interesting but unhelpful when you are trying to find Tuvalu. Most country databases default to alphabetical for the same reason.

The bottom line

The 195 countries on this list are the standard travelers' baseline. Africa has 54, Asia has 48, Europe has 44, North America has 23, South America has 12, and Oceania has 14. The first 30 you visit will look like almost everyone else's first 30; the last 50 will look like nobody else's. The countries that are consistently at the back of the queue are Turkmenistan, North Korea, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, Chad, Mali / Burkina Faso / Niger, Nauru, Tuvalu, and Bhutan — and our next post will go through each of those in detail.

The most useful thing you can do with this list is open it alongside the My Travel Maps tool and tick off the countries you have actually visited. The map uses the same 195 baseline. You will probably discover one or two countries you forgot about (everyone does — Liechtenstein, Monaco, San Marino, and Andorra are the most-forgotten in our experience), and you will get a much clearer picture of where the holes in your map are.