Skip to content
Back to Legal & trust

Sources & attribution

Where our visa and embassy data come from, and the licences that apply.

Visa rules data

Main source: The Visa Matrix by xpressmike / Nomad Briefing, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The matrix cross-checks Wikipedia-style tables and other public sources and flags disputes. Our adapted visa data remains subject to CC BY-SA attribution and share-alike obligations. How we map and refresh cells is described on Methodology.

Download our visa data

To honour CC BY-SA 4.0 share-alike for the adapted Visa Matrix (and Wikipedia-family) data, Need a Visa? publishes an open download of every passport and destination pair we show. Each status comes from a source; we never invent one.

Each file includes the licence, attribution and the source version we used. If you share it, keep the attribution and the CC BY-SA 4.0 (or compatible share-alike) licence.

Wikipedia

Visa requirement tables on Wikipedia are generally available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Where Need a Visa? uses content derived via The Visa Matrix (or careful extraction), we attribute that family of sources under the same licence spirit and do not treat Wikipedia alone as an unverified sole truth.

Some corridor pages show a Visa history with entries marked “Reconstructed from Wikipedia history”. We built these by reading past revisions of each passport’s “Visa requirements for … citizens” article and noting when a country’s entry changed. Each entry links to the exact revision it came from. The date is when that revision was saved, unless the article stated when the change took effect. We skip rows we can’t read with confidence and changes that were reverted within a few weeks. These entries summarise Wikipedia contributors’ work under CC BY-SA 4.0. They are not official records.

OpenStreetMap (diplomatic missions)

Embassy and consulate geography is based on OpenStreetMap data, © OpenStreetMap contributors, licensed under the Open Database Licence (ODbL) 1.0. Copyright and contributor information: openstreetmap.org/copyright. OSM coverage is incomplete in many places — verify before you visit.

Bulk / downloadable missions DB: Need a Visa? does not publish a bulk download of the embassy directory, so ODbL share-alike for a derived database does not apply today. We attribute OpenStreetMap on the directory, each embassy page, the footer and this page. If we ever publish a bulk download, it will follow the ODbL.

What we do not claim

Need a Visa? does not display Henley or IATA logos, and does not claim “official Henley” or commercial Timatic data. We don't use those paid sources.

Country names & codes

Page addresses use two-letter country codes (ISO 3166-1) (for example /passport/au). Names follow common Australian English usage, with notes for territories where needed.