The US Caribbean islands, and where you can go without a passport

Which Caribbean islands are part of the United States?

Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands, and that is the whole list of places you can stand on. The Department of the Interior's Office of Insular Affairs counts thirteen unincorporated US territories, three of them in the Caribbean: Puerto Rico, the United States Virgin Islands and Navassa Island, a two-square-mile rock between Haiti and Jamaica that the US Fish and Wildlife Service has kept as a refuge since 1999, closed to the public and lived on by nobody. Puerto Rico is also a commonwealth, one of two with the Northern Mariana Islands; the Office of Insular Affairs calls that a more developed relationship with the federal government, not a different passport.

The US Virgin Islands are four islands with people on them: St. Thomas, where the airport and the cruise piers are; St. John, a 20 minute ferry east and mostly national park; St. Croix, 44 miles south across open water; and Water Island in the harbor off Charlotte Amalie. Puerto Rico is the big island to the west, 47 miles from St. Thomas to its east coast at Fajardo and 78 to San Juan by our measure, with Vieques and Culebra in between.

Every other English-speaking island in the Caribbean belongs to somebody else: a British Overseas Territory, an independent country in the Commonwealth, or a piece of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The Bahamas and Jamaica, the two most often asked about, have been independent since 1973 and 1962. Neither is a US territory, and neither ever was.

What being part of the US means when you travel

It means the trip is domestic until you choose otherwise. US Customs and Border Protection treats a citizen flying in from a territory as never having left the country, so there is no passport, no customs form and no immigration line on arrival; you show the TSA the same REAL ID or other accepted ID you would for a flight to Chicago, and a child under 18 shows nothing. Which IDs count, and what the TSA's ConfirmID check costs without one, is the St. Thomas passport guide's subject.

Most mainland phone plans treat the islands as home, though a plan written around the lower 48 is worth one call before you fly, and the federal agencies are the ones you know: the National Park Service on St. John, the National Weather Service's forecast from San Juan, the TSA at the checkpoint.

The one place the two territories part is the flight home. Puerto Rico sits inside the US customs territory, so San Juan has a USDA inspector checking bags for fruit and plants before the gate and nothing else. The US Virgin Islands sit outside it, which is why CBP runs predeparture processing at Cyril E. King on St. Thomas and Henry E. Rohlsen on St. Croix before you board, and why the duty-free allowance is $1,600 a person rather than $800, with five liters of rum inside it on conditions the passport guide spells out. The USDA checks bags there too: most fresh fruit and vegetables and many plants cannot go to the mainland, as of its September 2026 list, so the mangoes stay on the island.

The English-speaking Caribbean islands and who governs them

English is official from the Bahamas to Trinidad, and only two of those flags are American. The rest fall into three families, and the family decides what you carry.

The British territories keep the King as head of state, with a governor and their own elected governments and laws, per the UK's 2026 paper on its fourteen Overseas Territories. The Commonwealth countries are sovereign states; the Commonwealth is an association, not a government. Sint Maarten has been a country within the Dutch kingdom since October 10, 2010, and shares its island with French Saint Martin. The French islands, Saint Martin's north half, Saint Barthélemy, Guadeloupe and Martinique, are France: French on the signs, the euro, and a passport book. Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire are Dutch, with Papiamento and Dutch official and English spoken nearly everywhere a visitor goes.

Air travel is the simple rule: coming home by plane from any island that is not US territory, CBP accepts a passport book and nothing less, children included, as of its May 2025 FAQ. The money is less of a worry than the paperwork. The East Caribbean dollar has been fixed at EC$2.70 to the US dollar since 1976, per the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank, the Cayman dollar sits at CI$1 to US$1.20, and the British Virgin Islands and Turks and Caicos simply use the US dollar.

The closed-loop cruise exception, as CBP states it

A cruise is the one way a US citizen sees the foreign Caribbean without a passport, and the rule is narrower than the brochures make it. CBP's wording, as of May 2025: a citizen who boards at a US port, travels only within the Western Hemisphere and returns to the same US port on the same ship may re-enter with a government-issued photo ID and proof of citizenship, meaning an original or a copy of the birth certificate, a Consular Report of Birth Abroad or a Certificate of Naturalization. CBP recommends the original or a certified copy. A child under 16 arriving by sea needs only the proof of citizenship. A passport card does the same job at the pier, since it is valid for land and sea crossings within the hemisphere and never for a flight.

The catch is in CBP's next sentence: you may still be required to present a passport to enter the countries the ship visits. The Bahamas is the plain case. Its Immigration Department asks every arrival for a passport with six months left on it and says passport cards are not accepted, as of June 2024, so a birth certificate gets you back to Miami and not necessarily onto the dock in Nassau; the cruise lines handle this with the Bahamian authorities, and the line's own document rules are the ones to read before you sail. The second catch is any day the cruise goes wrong. A missed ship or a medical flight home from a foreign port is an arrival by air, and that takes the book.

Our read: the closed-loop rule is for the person who already holds the ticket and has no time left for a passport appointment. Everyone else carries the book, and a ship that starts and ends in San Juan or St. Thomas counts as a US port for the rule, though the line's rules decide what it will board.

How the US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico differ

Scale, first. Puerto Rico is about 110 miles end to end by our measure, with 3.3 million people at the 2020 count, Spanish as the first language of most of them, driving on the right, and San Juan as the region's airline hub. The US Virgin Islands are three small islands and 87,000 people, English-speaking, driving on the left, with one commercial airport on St. Thomas, a second on St. Croix and a ferry to St. John. A Puerto Rico week is a road trip with a city at one end. A Virgin Islands week is a house above a bay, a jeep in low gear and a boat.

Both are domestic, both spend the dollar, and both end with a USDA inspector looking in your bag. The tradeoff of the smaller territory is price and supply: almost everything on St. Thomas and St. John arrives by ship, there is one airport for the two of them, and the ferry timetable sets the rhythm of the day. That is our read, not an index. Which of the two Virgin Islands suits a first trip is a question the which-island guide answers with measured drive times, and driving on the left has a guide of its own.

Where the Virgin Islands sit on the map

East of Puerto Rico, at the point where the Greater Antilles give way to the long curve of the Lesser Antilles. From Charlotte Amalie on St. Thomas it is about 78 miles west to San Juan, 44 south to Christiansted on St. Croix and 1,100 northwest to Miami, all measured point to point on the map; New York is about 1,640. St. John lies four miles east of St. Thomas across Pillsbury Sound, and Tortola in the British Virgin Islands begins seven miles east of Cruz Bay, close enough that the border is a ferry line rather than a horizon.

The Atlantic lies along the north shore of every island here and the Caribbean Sea along the south, which is why a winter north swell runs onto the North Shore beaches first and leaves the south-facing bays calm. Navassa, the third US possession, is about 660 miles west between Haiti and Jamaica and on nobody's itinerary. The clocks sit on Atlantic Standard Time all year, the same hour as New York from March to November and one hour ahead through the winter.

All five inhabited US territories, and the two Caribbean ones

Five US territories have permanent populations, and the Caribbean holds two of them. The other three are in the Pacific: Guam, with 153,836 people at the 2020 count, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands with 47,329 and American Samoa with 49,710, per the Census Bureau's Island Areas census. A US citizen needs no passport for Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, Guam or the Northern Marianas; American Samoa asks for a passport or a certified birth certificate, and the three freely associated states, Palau, the Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia, are foreign countries that need one, per USA.gov as of March 2026. The remaining eight on the Office of Insular Affairs' list of thirteen are reefs, atolls and Navassa, with nobody home.

Questions about the US Virgin Islands