LGBT+ rights

An index of laws that protect or discriminate against LGBT+ people, in points.

The LGBT+ Policy Index scores each country's laws on sexual orientation and gender identity. Laws that protect, such as the right to marry, to adopt or to be shielded from discrimination, add points; laws that discriminate, such as criminalising same-sex relations, subtract them. It covers 18 kinds of law, weighted by how much they matter, and runs from strongly negative to strongly positive. Kristopher Velasco (Princeton University) compiles it from legal records, and Our World in Data republishes it.

World map · LGBT+ Policy Index

Year

Source: Velasco (2026) – with major processing by Our World in Data (updated 2026-07-15) · fetched 29 Oct 2026

Over time · LGBT+ Policy Index

Source: Velasco (2026) – with major processing by Our World in Data (updated 2026-07-15) · fetched 29 Oct 2026

Years

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All countries · LGBT+ Policy Index

Continent Year

Source: Velasco (2026) – with major processing by Our World in Data (updated 2026-07-15) · fetched 29 Oct 2026

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Every country and year, with the source on each row.

About the author

Hello there, I’m Klaus Jürgen Folz. I studied Mechanical Engineering at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Brazil, and I work in Austria as a lead Python and Power BI developer. I built Data Mechanics because good decisions start with facts. Public data is often scattered, hard to find or locked behind paywalls, and too much of what we read about the world is biased. Here, every number is shown as it was published, next to its source, so anyone can check it, compare countries and leaders, and draw their own conclusions.

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