How it works

RSO Travel Matrix collects reports of US registrants entering other countries, including forum posts, news coverage, advocacy groups, and official sources. It then scores each country by how those trips went. Every report links to where it came from.

Where reports come from

• Trip reports that registrants share publicly on forums and discussion boards.
• Anonymous reports sent through our trip report form.
• Articles and comment threads from advocacy groups.
• News coverage of registrants being admitted, refused, or removed.
• The original RTAG Travel Matrix, kept as a low-weight baseline. It was last maintained around 2021 and has no dates or sources for individual entries.

The Sources page lists every source by category.

An AI model reads each source and pulls out the country, date, outcome, and what happened, in its own words and without names. A person reviews every batch before it's published.

Country pages also have a short "What to expect" summary, written by an AI model from that country's reports. Each sentence links to the reports it's based on, and a summary is rewritten only when its reports change and reviewed like everything else.

The US states page works differently: it's built from each state's and territory's own statutes, not traveler reports. An AI model reads the official law text for how soon a visiting registrant must register, whether visitors appear on the public registry, and places registrants can't go. It's checked for changes every three months and fully re-researched every two years, and entries not yet confirmed against the statute text are marked.

How countries are scored

Each outcome has a value, from +1 for "admitted, no issues" to −1 for "refused entry". Being questioned or sent to secondary inspection before being let in counts only +0.25, so a country where that's the norm can't be rated Open. A country's score is the weighted average of its reports. A report's weight depends on:

• Age. A report counts half as much every 18 months.
• Source. Official and news sources count more than forum posts, and firsthand accounts count more than secondhand ones.
• Clarity. Reports whose details are unclear count less, and ones the AI model isn't sure about are left out.
• Registry status. Trips by people who had already been removed from the registry count half as much. Their conviction is usually still on their criminal record, and many countries can refuse entry for that alone. But no registry notice is sent ahead of them, so their trips are a weaker guide to what a current registrant will face. These reports are labeled "Former registrant".

Open

Recent reports of entry without significant problems.

Caution

Usually admitted, but questioning or secondary inspection is common.

Difficult

Mixed results; a meaningful share of registrants have been refused.

Refused

Registrants are consistently refused, or the law bars entry.

Countries often treat travelers differently depending on how they arrive. A land crossing or a cruise stop may never involve the passport check that stops air travelers, so each report shows how the traveler arrived. Reports of changing planes are shown but don't affect the rating, since the traveler never entered the country.

A country where a quarter or more of recent trips by current registrants ended in refusal is rated Difficult at best, even if most travelers got in.

If a country has a confirmed law that refuses entry over a criminal conviction, it can't be rated Open, and a law that both names sex offenses and requires refusal makes it Refused. Almost every country also keeps a general power to turn anyone away on public-order grounds; we show that on the country page, but it doesn't change the rating, because it says nothing about registrants in particular. Countries with little data, or where the newest report is more than two years old, are hatched on the map.

What the official numbers show

The reports on this site are individual accounts. A few government figures give a sense of the scale behind them, and they are worth reading alongside the map.

• In the 2017 budget year, 2,060 advance notifications about traveling registrants were sent to more than 80 countries, and1,276 of those travelers were refused entry(Senate appropriations report, 2019, pages 50–51).
• For the 2014 budget year, the agency that sends those notifications reported more than 2,200 notifications to over 100 countries, with about 500 travelers refused. It also gave two country figures: Mexico, 757 reported and 215 refused, and thePhilippines, 212 reported and 125 refused(agency paper, 2016).
• Refusals are rare in general. Japan refused landing to 8,546 people in 2025 out of42.4 million arrivals, about 0.02%, of whom 505 fell under a legal ground that includes past sentences (Immigration Services Agency).

Two cautions. The 2017 and 2014 figures come from an agency describing its own program to the people who fund it, and they don't reconcile with each other — the refusal rate is 62% in one and roughly 23% in the other, so treat them as rough scale, not a trend. And no government anywhere publishes the cases where someone was admitted, which is why a site built only from official records would look far bleaker than travel actually is.

Limits

Border officers decide on the spot, and many countries receive advance notice of registrant travel from the US. One person's result doesn't guarantee yours. Use this site to decide what to research next, not as permission to travel, and talk to an immigration attorney before you book.

Using this data

The reports, ratings, and state rules on this site are published under aCreative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Reuse them anywhere, including commercially, as long as you credit RSO Travel Matrix and link back. Advocacy groups and attorneys are welcome to republish country or state pages. The sources each report links to keep their own rights.

Privacy

This site sets no cookies, runs no analytics, and loads nothing from other servers. It doesn't know who you are or which countries you look at. The one exception is the trip report form, which runs an automated bot check to keep out spam. Reports are stored without your IP address and deleted once they're processed.