What 25 Destinations Actually Require: Research Findings

Five findings from the dataset

• Not one of the 25 destinations we researched has published a national policy accepting digital-only driving documents. 25 have no published position at all. 0 accept them. This is the single largest evidence gap in the category, and it sits directly beneath a market where instant digital delivery is routinely advertised.
• A permit requirement is not the norm. Only 13 of 25 destinations expect a permit or translation outright. The rest operate a visitor time-limit rule, defer to sub-national authorities, or turn on the script the licence is written in.
• Convention membership is not interchangeable. 13 of 25 are party to more than one convention, 10 to the 1949 Geneva Convention alone and 1 to the 1968 Vienna Convention alone. A permit issued under the wrong convention is not a substitute — Japan is the clearest case.
• Alcohol limits vary more than speed limits do. Across the sample the limit ranges from 0.0 in Morocco to 0.08 in United States. 15 of 25 apply a tiered limit that is stricter for new, young or professional drivers than the headline figure suggests.
• 7 of 25 destinations drive on the left. Driving side is the one variable that is universally documented and never disputed, which is why we treat it as verified everywhere while leaving speed limits and rental ages unstated where no source confirms them.

The digital-document gap, stated precisely

This is the finding we would most like other people to check, because it is the one the category gets wrong most often.

An absence of published policy is not the same as prohibition, and we do not present it as one. What it means practically is that no traveller can point to a national rule saying a digital document will be accepted, which is why every country page on this site treats a printed document as the safe default.

How the requirement is actually structured

The category tends to present this as a binary — you need a permit or you do not. Across the destinations we have researched it is not binary. A visitor time-limit rule, a sub-national rule and a script-dependent rule are three different mechanisms that produce three different answers for the same traveller.

Convention membership across the sample

Read alongside the 1949 Geneva Convention and 1968 Vienna Convention explainers. Where a destination is party to both, the later convention generally governs between states party to both.

Alcohol limits, lowest to highest

Headline figures understate the strictness. 15 of 25 destinations apply a lower limit to new, young or professional drivers, and in several the stricter tier lasts years rather than months.

Motorway limits across the sample

Methodology

Sample. 25 destinations of 124 in the dataset. The remaining 99 have not been researched to publication standard and are excluded from every figure on this page rather than estimated into it.

Standard for inclusion. A destination enters the sample only when at least two official sources — a national road authority, a government travel advisory or a treaty record — have been located and recorded, and a review date logged. 78 sources underlie the figures above.

What we do not do. We do not estimate a missing value. Where a speed limit, rental age or alcohol limit could not be confirmed, the field is empty in the dataset and the country page says so. That is why some tables above contain fewer than 25 rows.

Reproducibility. Every figure is computed at build time from the open dataset, published under CC BY 4.0. You can recompute all of it. Our editorial and verification policy sets out the standard in full.

Sources last reviewed: 2026-07-23. Figures recomputed on every site build.

Citing this research

Cite as: WorldIDP, "What 25 Destinations Actually Require: Research Findings", https://worldidp.com/research/idp-requirements-findings/, retrieved 2026-07-23.

The underlying data is open under CC BY 4.0 and available as a CSV download. If you find an error, we would rather hear about it than not — corrections are handled under our editorial policy.