Americans’ optimism about the future plunged to a new record low in 2025, according to a Gallup poll released Tuesday.
The survey found that the percentage of U.S. adults who expect to lead high-quality lives in five years — a metric Gallup calls “future life ratings” — dropped to 59.2% last year, marking the lowest level since Gallup began asking this question nearly two decades ago. Meanwhile, future life ratings have declined a total of 9.1 percentage points since 2020, projecting to an estimated 24.5 million less Americans who presently feel hopeful about the future versus that year, the poll shows.
The majority of that drop occurred between 2021 and 2023, but future life ratings notably fell by 3.5 percentage points between 2024 and 2025, according to Gallup.
In the fourth quarter of 2025, the percentage of Americans who rated both their current and future lives highly enough to be considered “thriving” plunged to 48.0%, marking a decline of over 11 points from the 59.2% peak measured in June 2021, the survey suggests. Moreover, future life optimism among all three major political identity groups declined roughly five percentage points from 2021 to 2024, according to the poll.
The newly released Gallup poll did not ask those surveyed to give the reasoning behind their responses. However, Dan Witters, the research director for Gallup’s National Health and Well-Being Index, told The Washington Post on Tuesday that the recent drop in Americans’ optimism began amid high inflation during 2021 and 2022, which occurred under former President Joe Biden’s administration. Witters told the outlet that “even as the pandemic was kind of receding, those affordability issues, which of course linger on in not insignificant ways to this day, I think, had a lot to do with it.”
“Many economic indicators and measures of consumers’ feelings about the economy have plummeted at various times since Covid, whether that was during the initial government-imposed lockdowns, inflation hitting 40-year highs, the housing market freezing over, etc.,” E.J. Antoni, chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, told the Daily Caller News Foundation on Tuesday. “Muddying the waters over the last year or so is the fact that Democrat respondents in polls have been allowing their hatred of President [Donald] Trump to cloud their view of the economy.”
“For example, Democrat respondents in the biased University of Michigan survey of consumer sentiment have been expecting record-high inflation under Mr. Trump, which obviously hasn’t materialized,” Antoni continued. “Nevertheless, these responses have dragged down the overall metrics of how people view the economy. However, even Republicans are not yet thrilled with the economy because it’s taking a while to undo all the damage from the Biden years.”
The biggest drop in future life ratings from 2021 to 2025 occurred among Democrats, with the percentage who said they expected to live “thriving” lives in five years falling by nearly 13 percentage points over the time period, according to the Gallup survey. In 2025 alone — the year Trump took office to begin his second term — this metric fell by nearly eight points among Democrats.
The same percentage for Republicans meanwhile fell by four points from 2021 to 2025, while the percentage among independents fell by 6.5 points during the same time frame, per the Gallup poll.
Several recent polls have indicated that many Americans are now increasingly concerned about economic conditions in the country.
Additionally, U.S. small businesses’ optimism fell in January, declining 0.2 points to 99.3, according to a National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) survey released on Tuesday. NFIB’s Uncertainty Index, which measures small business owners’ levels of uncertainty about U.S. economic conditions and the future, rose seven points in January from December 2025.
However, more Americans felt optimistic about economic growth improving over the next six months than those who felt pessimistic about it, according to a separate Gallup survey released on Monday. Of those surveyed, 49% were optimistic about U.S. economic growth rising during the next six months, 36% were pessimistic and 13% thought the economy will remain the same, according to the poll.
The poll’s results are a part of Gallup’s National Health and Well-Being Index. The 2025 results are based on data collected over four quarterly measurement periods, totaling 22,125 interviews with U.S. adults who are part of the Gallup Panel, which is a probability-based panel that encompasses all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
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