Why passports come in only a handful of colours, and how countries choose theirs

Coats of arms, gold-foil typography, national animals stamped into leather-look covers — passport design can be intricate. Yet strip away the decoration and almost every travel document on earth falls into just one of four cover colours: red, blue, green or black.

That is not an accident of taste. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) sets the global rulebook for passports in Document 9303, which standardises the machine-readable data page and fixes the booklet's physical size — the "ID-3" format, 125mm by 88mm under ISO/IEC 7810 — the same standard used for ID cards more broadly. What Doc 9303 does not do is dictate a colour. Beyond the size and the data-page layout, a government can bind its passport in whatever shade it likes.

Blue and red dominate the count

Given a free choice, most governments still land on one of a handful of options. Passport Index, the database run by citizenship-advisory firm Arton Group, catalogued cover colours for 201 passport-issuing authorities in 2016 and found blue the single most-used shade, held by 70 of them, with red close behind on 67. Together the two families accounted for roughly two-thirds of every passport surveyed, with green and black splitting most of what remained.

Those exact tallies move over time as countries redesign their documents, and different trackers group "navy" or "maroon" into blue or red differently, so the figures are best read as a snapshot of 2016 rather than a live count. The pattern they describe, however, still holds today: independent color-meaning guides published in the years since continue to describe blue and red as the two most widely used passport colours worldwide.

Regional blocs choose one colour together

The single biggest force behind any one colour is politics, not taste. In 1981, representatives of the (then) European Community agreed a resolution asking every member state to adopt a common burgundy-red cover from 1985, explicitly to "strengthen the feeling among nationals of the Member States that they belong to the same Community". The resolution was never legally binding, yet nearly every member fell in line. Croatia, which joined in 2013, is the one holdout still issuing a dark blue passport. The United Kingdom returned to a blue cover of its own after leaving the EU in 2020, turning the colour of its passport into one of the more visible symbols of that departure.

Other blocs run the same playbook. Every CARICOM member has issued a passport in the same three-colour scheme since the bloc's first common passport in 2005: dark blue for ordinary citizens, green for government officials and red for diplomats. Bloc membership can pull a colour choice even outside a formal agreement — Turkey, a long-standing EU candidate, moved its passport to a burgundy red widely read as a nod toward the union it hopes to join.

A country's passport colour is rarely a solo decision — it is usually a signal about which club that country belongs to, or wants to.

Religion, flags and national colour

Where there is no bloc to fall in line with, governments tend to reach for a colour that already carries meaning at home. Green is heavily associated with Islam — traditionally linked to the Prophet Muhammad and to the Quran's descriptions of paradise — and shows up on the passports of many Muslim-majority states, including Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Morocco, alongside other nations such as Nigeria. A national flag can do the same job directly: Switzerland's passport has been a bright, unmistakable red since 1959, echoing the red-and-white cross on its flag, and the covers stayed red through the country's most recent passport redesign.

Black is the rarest of the four families. New Zealand issues a black passport because black functions as an unofficial national colour there, worn by its sports teams and used across its state branding. Several African states — including Botswana, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Zambia, Burundi, Gabon and Malawi — also use black covers, and a scattering of other countries have used it too. Beyond symbolism, dark covers of any colour share a practical advantage: they show dirt, ink and years of handling far less than a pale one, which matters for a document meant to last a decade.

• Blue — the single most common colour by country count; strongly associated with the Americas and Oceania.
• Red — driven above all by the European Union's shared burgundy cover, plus unrelated choices like Switzerland's flag-red.
• Green — concentrated in Muslim-majority nations, tied to the colour's standing in Islam.
• Black — the rarest family; a national-colour choice (New Zealand) or a practical one (hides wear).

Does a bigger population change the answer?

Counting issuing authorities is only one way to ask "what is the most common passport colour". Counting passport holders is another, and it can tilt the result. China alone, with a red passport and a population above 1.4 billion, adds more people to the red column than most entire continents. But the same logic cuts the other way for blue: India and the United States, both with blue passports and enormous populations of their own, are large enough that a genuine population-weighted ranking is closer than a single country's headline number suggests, rather than a clean flip to red. Treated carefully, population weighting is a reminder that "most common" depends entirely on what is being counted — authorities, or people.

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