Why passports come in just 4 colours

3 min read · Updated 2 October 2026

Look at the passports of the world, and you'll notice something strange. Nearly all of them come in one of just four colours. Red, blue, green or black.

This is Countries Compared. Today: who decides what colour your passport is? The answer is more surprising than you'd think.

First, passports are younger than you think.

Before the First World War, you could cross most of Europe without any papers at all. The war changed that. Countries feared spies, and passports became compulsory. In 1920, the League of Nations met in Paris and agreed on a standard booklet. 32 pages, a cardboard cover, the country's name at the top, and the coat of arms in the middle. Around sixty years later, the UN's aviation agency, ICAO, added the machine readable page. The two lines of letters and arrows at the bottom.

Today, those rules are incredibly detailed. The size of the booklet, the data page, the chip with your photo, even the typeface. Since 2010, every new passport has had to be machine readable. But one thing isn't in the rules at all. The colour of the cover. Any country can choose any colour it likes.

So why does almost everyone pick the same four?

The practical reason first. Dark colours look serious and official, and they hide dirt and wear over ten years of travel. Only a handful of companies make passport cover material, and countries tend to copy their neighbours and their allies.

Red first. In 1981, European countries agreed on a common burgundy cover. That's why most EU passports look almost identical. But it was only a recommendation. Croatia joined the EU in 2013 and kept its blue passport. And after Brexit, in 2020, the UK went back to the dark blue it had used for most of the 20th century.

Green is common in many Muslim majority countries, like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran. The explanation usually given is the importance of green in Islam, the same green you see on many of their flags. The West African bloc, ECOWAS, uses green too.

Blue is common across the Americas. The United States has had blue passports since 1976, the country's 200th birthday. Before that, they were green, and before that, red. South American countries in the Mercosur bloc agreed on a common dark blue.

And black is the rarest. New Zealand switched to black in 2009. Black is often called its national colour, from the All Blacks rugby team onwards. A few other countries use it too.

So, does the colour mean anything?

Not really. Singapore's passport is red, and it's one of the most powerful in the world. Japan's is red too. Pakistan's and Afghanistan's are green, and they're near the bottom of the rankings. It's the country behind the cover that matters, not the cover.

But inside one country, the colour can tell you who you are. In the U.S., ordinary citizens get dark blue, diplomats get black, and government officials get maroon. Pakistan does something similar. Green for citizens, blue for officials, and red for diplomats.

And since the outside is so plain, designers get creative inside. Canada's passport hides images you can only see under UV light. Finnish passports have a little flipbook animation in the corner. And Japan's has 24 prints by Hokusai, including the Great Wave.

In short: Your passport's colour isn't a law of nature. It's a hundred years of habit, copying, and a few practical choices. What really matters is the name on the cover, and how the world sees that country.