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Public trust in the United States government

See all data and research on:
Trust

What you should know about this indicator

  • This data shows the share of people replying "just about always" or "most of the time" to the question "How much of the time do you think you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right?" The options were "just about always", "most of the time", "only some of the time", and "never".
  • The data combines surveys from Pew Research Center, National Election Studies, Gallup, ABC/Washington Post, CBS/New York Times, and CNN.
  • From the original data, we extracted the smoothed trend (which is a three-survey moving average) and then averaged the values to have one observation per year.

How is this data described by its producer?

% who say they trust the government in Washington to do what is right just about always/most of the time

Sources: Pew Research Center, National Election Studies, Gallup, ABC/Washington Post, CBS/New York Times, and CNN surveys.

Note: From 1976-February 2025, the smoothed trend line represents a three-survey moving average. Data prior to 1976, and the most recent number (September 2025), are from individual polls.

Public trust in the United States government
Share of people who say they trust the US government to do what is right just about always/most of the time, based on a smoothed trend.
Source
Pew Research Center (2025) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
February 16, 2026
Next expected update
February 2027
Date range
1958–2025
Unit
%

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

Pew Research Center – Public trust in US government - Pew Research Center

% who say they trust the government in Washington to do what is right just about always/most of the time. Data from Pew Research Center, National Election Studies, Gallup, ABC/Washington Post, CBS/New York Times, and CNN surveys.

Retrieved on
February 16, 2026
Retrieved from
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/12/04/public-trust-in-government-1958-2025/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
“Public Trust in Government: 1958-2025.” Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C. (4 December 2025) https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/12/04/public-trust-in-government-1958-2025/.

% who say they trust the government in Washington to do what is right just about always/most of the time. Data from Pew Research Center, National Election Studies, Gallup, ABC/Washington Post, CBS/New York Times, and CNN surveys.

Retrieved on
February 16, 2026
Retrieved from
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/12/04/public-trust-in-government-1958-2025/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
“Public Trust in Government: 1958-2025.” Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C. (4 December 2025) https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/12/04/public-trust-in-government-1958-2025/.

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator

From the original data, we extracted the smoothed trend (which is a three-survey moving average) and then averaged the values to have one observation per year.

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Public trust in the United States government”, part of the following publication: Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, Max Roser, and Pablo Arriagada (2016) - “Trust”. Data adapted from Pew Research Center. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/public-trust-in-government.html [online resource] (archived on March 4, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Pew Research Center (2025) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

Pew Research Center (2025) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Public trust in the United States government” [dataset]. Pew Research Center, “Public trust in US government - Pew Research Center” [original data]. Retrieved April 1, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/public-trust-in-government.html (archived on March 4, 2026).

Download

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Download the data shown in this chart as a ZIP file containing a CSV file, metadata in JSON format, and a README. The CSV file can be opened in Excel, Google Sheets, and other data analysis tools.

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Data API

Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.

Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/public-trust-in-government.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/public-trust-in-government.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/public-trust-in-government.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/public-trust-in-government.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/public-trust-in-government.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/public-trust-in-government.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/public-trust-in-government.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/public-trust-in-government.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear