WASHINGTON — The New York lawmaker who has jetted across the globe most frequently on someone else’s dime is not a former first lady, Senator Clinton, nor is it the country’s third most powerful Democratic senator, Charles Schumer. It is also not the chairman of the influential House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Charles Rangel of Harlem.

The top traveler in the state’s congressional delegation is none other than Rep. Gregory Meeks of Queens, who since 2000 has accepted 43 privately financed trips worth more than $160,000.

Mrs. Clinton — who is surely one of the most sought-after lawmakers in Congress — is second, with 39 trips costing about $77,000, according to a new online database launched by a company that bills itself as a watchdog, Legistorm.

Mr. Meeks, who took office in 1998 and represents Jamaica and most of southeast Queens, over the years has hit an array of locations that include Egypt, Cuba, Israel, Qatar, and Ghana.

His most recent stop, according to the database, came in November, when he spent six days in Rome for a summit on trade, poverty, and development sponsored by the Congressional Economic Leadership Institute. Weeks before, he stayed in Panama for four days, attending the annual Caribbean Multinational Business Conference.

Privately sponsored congressional travel has come under amplified scrutiny in recent years as trips paid for by lobbyists have been linked to corruption scandals. All of Mr. Meeks’s trips disclosed in the database came before new travel rules took effect in March. Those rules tighten restrictions on travel, ban most lobbyist involvement, and require approval of all privately funded trips by a House committee.

Mr. Meeks, who sits on the Financial Services and Foreign Relations committees, has long led his New York colleagues in private travel, and his pace has not slowed markedly in recent years — he took 10 trips in 2005-06.

He makes no apologies, saying the excursions are necessary for him to have the information and varied perspectives key to making policy decisions on issues such as trade and international relations. “I think the trips are good,” he said in a telephone interview yesterday. “They should be encouraged.”

Watchdog groups that monitor congressional travel say that while many privately funded trips serve legitimate fact-finding purposes, others are little more than perk-filled junkets at lavish resorts.

Mr. Meeks’s destinations over the years have included several Caribbean hotspots — St. Thomas, Barbados, and Antigua among them — but he says all were above-board. “There was nothing that was done that was secrecy or taking a vacation,” he said. “I don’t know of any junket that I’ve ever been on.”

Congress, Mr. Meeks argues, overreacted in approving strict regulations on privately funded trips. Lawmakers are now more reluctant to accept free trips that could give them valuable insight abroad on important issues, he said. The new rules could end up costing taxpayers more money, the executive director of the Washington-based Center for Responsive Politics, Sheila Krumholz, said. “If you ban these trips outright, taxpayers are going to have to foot the bill for some legitimate travel,” she said, citing congressional visits to places such as Iraq, many of which are already publicly funded.

Mrs. Clinton accepted free trips mostly within the 50 states, although she traveled to Germany, India, and Israel in 2005. The database, at legistorm.com, does not include trips paid for with campaign funds.

“Senator Clinton is invited to go on hundreds of trips every year,” her Senate spokesman, Philippe Reines, said yesterday. “The majority of her trips are in support of her ongoing efforts to work closely with New York employers to further promote job growth throughout the state.”

She took several trips through her husband’s foundation, and five sponsored by the weapons maker Lockheed Martin.

The lawmaker who has accepted the most free trips in Congress since 2000 is Rep. Barney Frank, a Democrat of Massachusetts, with 84. He is followed closely by Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, a Democrat of Ohio, who took 79 privately funded trips.

New York’s senior senator, Mr. Schumer, has accepted just four trips, and two of them were paid for by television networks for appearances on Sunday morning talk shows in Washington. Mr. Rangel, the dean of the state delegation, has taken seven.

The Web site maintained by Legistorm, a company founded last year by a former investigative journalist, Jock Friedly, is the latest effort to catalogue privately funded travel by members of Congress. The Center for Responsive Politics and the Center for Public Integrity have launched searchable online databases in past years, but they have not been continuously updated.