The topic, answered with a census
Diplomacy.edu's consular diplomacy page treats the subject as practice: the daily work of states protecting citizens and paper abroad. Our contribution is the census underneath the practice. The database behind this site holds 1,457 mission records from 22 home countries across 119 host countries, verified in September 2026.
| Home country | Missions recorded |
|---|---|
| China | 198 |
| United States | 188 |
| Russia | 173 |
| France | 125 |
| United Kingdom | 112 |
| Mexico | 77 |
| Japan | 74 |
| Turkey | 56 |
The United States is also the largest host: 157 of the records sit on US soil, ahead of China (93) and Germany (62) as hosts.
Embassies are only half the network
Of the 1,457 records, 755 are embassies covering a whole country (52 percent) and 702 are other posts covering a region inside one: consulates general, consulates and honorary posts. Consular diplomacy, in other words, is mostly not embassy work. It is regional work, done by the office whose jurisdiction list decides whether your application even belongs there, which is why our jurisdiction guides exist.
The generic label problem
Asked what these missions do, 1,350 of the 1,457 records (93 percent) answer with one generic line: consular and visa services (standard). The records that itemize are more honest about the job: passport services, visa services, emergency citizen assistance, notarial services, birth and death registration, document attestation and legalization. The gap between the generic label and the itemized few is the real finding: the world's consular network describes itself in boilerplate, and the traveler finds the specifics only office by office.
The digital gap
The records publish an address 58 percent of the time, a phone number 56 percent, a website 44 percent, an email 33 percent and office hours just 20 percent. Appointment booking links are the rarest field in the database: 23 records of 1,457, or 1.6 percent. Whatever consular diplomacy is in theory, in practice it still runs on phone calls, walk-ins and third-party appointment platforms, and any tool in this space, including our Honorary or Real? checker, is built on records this uneven.