Gay Travel Index 2026
LGBTQ+ legal status and travel safety, country by country. The legal ground shifts every year — this page tracks where it stands now, so you know before you book.
The world is polarizing, not converging
There is no single global direction. One set of countries keeps expanding equality — marriage, adoption, gender recognition, anti-discrimination law. Another keeps tightening the screws with new criminalization, censorship, and repression. In 2025 the number of countries criminalizing same-sex intimacy grew for the first time in almost a decade. Read any destination on both axes: the law on the books, and how it's enforced on the ground.
Welcoming
Marriage or strong partnership rights, anti-discrimination protection, visible acceptance.
Some caution
Legal, but socially conservative or missing full protections. Discretion advised in places.
High risk
Criminalized, or active state repression and prosecution. Serious caution required.
Death-penalty risk
Death penalty imposed or a legal possibility. The most severe environments on earth.
What changed, and where
Legal status is not static. These are the most significant shifts rights monitors recorded heading into 2026 — the reason a travel index needs re-checking every year rather than trusting an old map.
◤ Progress
- 🇹🇭Thailand — marriage equality took effect Jan 2025; first in Southeast Asia.
- 🇳🇵Nepal — Supreme Court ordered equal marriage rights; registration underway.
- 🇱🇮Liechtenstein — marriage equality in force 2025.
- 🇩🇲Dominica & 🇳🇦 Namibia — decriminalized same-sex intimacy (2024).
- 🇵🇱Poland — climbed from rank 118 to 59 (Spartacus ranking, not the GTI score); last "LGBT-free zone" fell.
◢ Regression
- 🇧🇾Belarus — signed a Russian-style "propaganda" ban (April 2026).
- 🇲🇱Mali — newly criminalized consensual same-sex acts.
- 🇧🇫Burkina Faso & 🇹🇹 Trinidad & Tobago — criminalized gay sex.
- 🇮🇩Indonesia — new criminal code bans sex outside marriage, effectively barring same-sex relations.
- 🇺🇸United States — slipped from rank 48th to 50th (Spartacus ranking); protections vary sharply by state.
- 🇮🇶Iraq, 🇸🇸 South Sudan, 🇹🇲 Turkmenistan — sharpest declines of 2026.
Reading the "death-penalty" label
Death penalty means it is legally possible under state or religious law — enforcement rates vary. Human Dignity Trust identifies active imposition in Iran, Northern Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen, and under Taliban rule Afghanistan is now assessed among those where it is imposed — six in all. The death penalty is a further legal possibility in Brunei, Mauritania, Pakistan, Qatar, the UAE and Uganda. In several of these, dating-app entrapment and digital surveillance are documented tactics — see our high-risk destination guides before any travel.
Methodology & sources
ILGA World
The global authority on sexual-orientation law. Our tier assignments follow its "Laws on Us" report and legal maps (updated May 2026), tracking criminalization, expression, association, and recognition.
Human Dignity Trust
Source for the criminalization and death-penalty detail. Many criminalizing laws are colonial-era legacies, especially across the Commonwealth.
Spartacus GTI 2026
The Score column is a 0–100 safety score (higher is safer), converted from the Spartacus Gay Travel Index 2026 (18 categories, 217 territories) onto the same 0–100 scale GayOut uses elsewhere. It reflects legal and social conditions, and is a points score — not a country rank, which is a separate figure.