Ask three passport indexes where the Pakistani passport ranks and you get three answers, each printed with total confidence. The rank is not a measurement; it is the output of a set of counting rules, and the rules differ enough to move the underlying count from 29 to 82 for the same passport in the same year.
The numbers on the table
Passport Index ranks Pakistan 96th, with a mobility score of 42 built from 9 visa-free, 29 visa on arrival, 4 ETA and 156 visa-required destinations. GICG ranks it 101st and headlines 29 destinations, although its own sections on the same page list 9 visa-free and 73 visa on arrival, which sum to 82 easy-entry destinations; the page does not agree with itself. A widely read Saad Ahsan guide presents 29 destinations in total: 11 visa-free, 15 on arrival and 3 ETA. Our own records, behind the Can I Go? Checker, hold 30 destinations for Pakistan: 14 visa-free and 16 on arrival, with no separate ETA class.
Why the counts move
ETA handling. An electronic travel authorization is a pre-approval, not a visa, and indexes file it differently: Passport Index gives it its own column, others fold it into visa on arrival or visa-free. Moving one category boundary moves several destinations at once. Territory counting. The Cook Islands, Niue, Montserrat and the Pitcairn Islands are separate destinations in our records; an index that folds territories into their parent states counts fewer doors. Conditional entries. San Marino is visa-free on paper and unreachable without a Schengen transit in practice; whether it counts is a judgment call. On-arrival definitions. Senegal's visa on arrival in our records requires an authorization letter obtained before travel, which is closer to an eVisa in effort than to a walk-up stamp. Each choice is defensible. Printing the resulting rank without the choices is not.
What a rank can and cannot tell you
A rank compresses stay lengths, fees, conditions and refusal risk into one ordinal number. The 30 destinations behind our count include six-month stays (Dominica, Montserrat) and a 14-day territory with almost no scheduled transport (Pitcairn). They include fee-free entries and an 80-dollar on-arrival fee (Sierra Leone). None of that survives into a rank. What survives is a rough sense of standing, and on that every index agrees: by any counting rule, the Pakistani passport sits near the bottom of the table, with roughly thirty doors open without a prior visa. Our strongest passport ranking explainer covers what the top of that table measures.
The number worth using
For planning, the useful unit is not the rank but the route: this passport, that destination, what happens at the border. That is the question the checker answers, and the full recorded table for Pakistan is in our by-country requirements page. Treat any single index's rank, including any we quote, as an approximation with its counting rules attached.