Data · European Commission, 2025 figures
Two consulates in the same city. Fifty-four points apart.
In Abuja last year, Italy refused 6.5% of the Schengen applications it received. Belgium, in the same city, refused 60.3%. Nobody tells applicants this, and most agents do not know it either.
The European Commission publishes the numbers every year, consulate by consulate. Here they are for 2025, arranged so you can actually use them.
The gap nobody mentions
Everyone in this industry talks about refusal rates by country. Nigeria is high, India is moderate, South Africa is low. True, and not very useful, because you cannot change which passport you hold.
The number that matters is the one underneath: refusal rates by consulate. Because two consulates a few streets apart, receiving applications from the same population, do not behave the same way at all.
Both of those figures are from Nairobi. Same year, same city, largely the same pool of applicants walking into the same visa centre. One consulate refused roughly one in six. The other refused three in five.
Every consulate, ranked
Pick where you are applying from. Consulates handling fewer than 300 applications in 2025 are left out, because at low volume the percentage stops meaning anything.
Overall refused
46.9%
Best to worst
53.8 pts
Consulates
20
Nearly half of all Nigerian applications were refused. But the gap between the best and worst consulate in Abuja is 54 points.
Source: European Commission, DG Migration and Home Affairs — Schengen visa statistics for consulates, 2025, published 28 May 2026.
What the number does and does not tell you
We should be honest about what this data is, because it would be easy to oversell it.
It is not your personal probability
A 46% refusal rate does not mean you have a 46% chance. It is the average of everybody who applied there, including people who applied with nothing.
Different consulates attract different applicants
A consulate handling mostly business travellers on repeat visits will look kinder than one handling first-time tourists. Some of the gap is who walks through the door, not how they are judged.
It says nothing about why
The Commission publishes the counts, not the reasons. A high rate does not tell you whether that consulate is strict, or simply receives weaker files.
What it does tell you is real
These are the actual decisions taken on more than eleven million applications. Whatever the causes, the outcomes differ enormously — and pretending they do not is how people end up filing into a 60% wall without knowing it.
You cannot simply pick the easiest one
Schengen rules decide which consulate handles you. You apply to the country that is your main destination — where you will spend the most time. If the trip is evenly split, you apply to your first point of entry. Choosing a consulate because its numbers look better, for a trip you are not really taking, is misuse of the rules and a refusal reason of its own.
So the data is not a shopping list. It is something more useful than that.
Most trips to Europe are not fixed to one country. Someone going for a fortnight, or to see family, or for a conference they could pair with a week anywhere, has genuine latitude in how the trip is planned — and the plan decides the main destination, which decides the consulate. That decision usually gets made carelessly, on the basis of a cheap flight. Made deliberately, with these numbers in front of you, it is worth more than anything else you will do to the application.
How to actually use this
Start with the trip, not the consulate
Decide where you genuinely want to go and how long in each place. That is the honest input, and everything else follows from it.
Where the trip allows a choice, look at the table
If two countries are both plausible as the main destination, the numbers above are a legitimate tie-breaker. That is not gaming the system. That is planning.
Then build the file to match
Whichever consulate it is, the file has to show a trip that plainly exists: dates that agree with each other, accommodation for every night, funds that fit the plan. Nothing on this page saves a file that contradicts itself.
This is one of the reasons we plan the trip and the application together rather than taking a plan and filling in forms. Where a client has real flexibility about where they go, that flexibility is worth using — and it should be used with the actual numbers, not a hunch.
Filing into a 60% wall is a decision. Usually an accidental one.
We plan the trip, choose the route, and build the file to match it — then tell you exactly what was done and when.
Continue Reading
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