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Every year, Schengen consulates refuse hundreds of thousands of short-stay visa applications — and every year, the country-by-country breakdown sits buried in a European Commission spreadsheet that almost nobody reads. This is that data, pulled out and made readable, with the one finding that matters most: how far apart two consulates in the same city can be.
By Olami Yusuf, AbroadPilot · Published September 2026 · Source: European Commission Migration and Home Affairs, full-year 2025 data
The headline numbers
Global average Schengen short-stay (type C) refusal rate for 2025: 14.6%. Here is where the nine nationalities the Commission called out specifically land against it.
The real story isn’t the country average — it’s the consulate spread
The single most striking number in this dataset isn’t any one country’s rate. It’s how differently two consulates in the same city, judging the same applicant pool under the same Visa Code, can rule:
- Accra: Germany refused 33.5% of short-stay applications in 2025. The Czech Republic refused 71.9% — more than double.
- Dakar: Germany refused 25.7%. Portugal refused 82.1% — a spread of more than 56 percentage points.
Applicants can’t usually shop between consulates — the Visa Code sends your file to the state of your main destination, or your point of first entry. What the spread shows is that a refusal often reflects which national administration received your file as much as anything in it.
What this dataset does not cover
Every figure above is for uniform short-stay (type C) Schengen visas — visits up to 90 days. Full-degree students moving to Europe apply for a national long-stay D visa, decided by that member state under its own rules; no public dataset breaks those down by consulate. Neither the United States (B visitor visas only, no F-1 rate by nationality) nor the United Kingdom (published as entry clearance statistics, not a single “refusal rate”) publish a directly comparable figure.
Citing this data
Figures compiled by AbroadPilot from the European Commission’s Migration and Home Affairs release, full-year 2025 data, checked 17 September 2026. Interactive breakdown and methodology: abroadpilot.com/visa-refusal-rates.
Explore the full dataset
This page is a summary. For the interactive version — select any of the nine nationalities and see the live comparison against the global average — use the Visa Refusal Rates tool. If you’re preparing your own application, the Refusal Risk Self-Assessment maps your file against the actual legal grounds a consulate refuses under.
