From safety and discrimination laws to policies around gender recognition, a lot more goes into making a country queer-friendly than an annual Pride festival. Back for its seventeenth year, 2025’s edition of the Rainbow Map looks into all these factors and more to name Europe’s most (and least) LGBTQ+-friendly countries.
The map, which is an annual project run by LGBTI organisation ILGA-Europe, ranks 49 European countries on their legal and policy practices for LGBTQ+ people on a scale from 0-100 percent.
The categories assessed include equality and non-discrimination, family, hate crime and hate speech, legal gender recognition, intersex bodily integrity, civil society space and asylum.
And, topping the list as the most LGBTQ+-friendly country in Europe for no less than the tenth consecutive year, is the sunny archipelago of Malta. It scored a solid 88.83 percent in total, ranking perfectly in the ‘hate crime and speech’, ‘legal gender recognition’ and ‘civil society space’ categories, improving on its 2024 score by 0.99 percent.
Belgium overtook Iceland to claim second place, with the latter now in third position. You can compare this year’s results to last year’s here.
In more good news, Poland, which was previously the lowest-ranking EU country, climbed three places this year after abolishing ‘LGBT-free zones’, and Austria, Latvia, Germany and Czechia all also recorded the biggest jumps in their rankings.
These are the 20 most LGBTQ+-friendly countries in Europe
- Malta
- Belgium
- Iceland
- Denmark
- Spain
- Finland
- Greece
- Germany
- Norway
- Luxembourg
- Portugal
- Sweden
- Netherlands
- Ireland
- France
- Austria
- Slovenia
- Switzerland
- Montenegro
- Croatia
However, progress wasn’t made everywhere. The report also found that Hungary, Georgia and the UK all experienced the biggest falls in their rankings, the UK specifically slipping six positions from 16th to 22nd, which is its lowest rank ever.
You can read more about the policies implemented across Europe and how they contributed to countries moving up or down the ranking in the full Rainbow Map report.
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