WASHINGTON, D.C. — The percentage of U.S. adults who anticipate high-quality lives in five years declined to 59.2% in 2025, the lowest level since measurement began nearly two decades ago. Since 2020, future life ratings have fallen a total of 9.1 percentage points, projecting to an estimated 24.5 million fewer people who are optimistic about the future now versus then. Most of that decline occurred between 2021 and 2023, but the ratings dropped 3.5 points between 2024 and 2025.
Americans’ ratings of their current lives have also declined since rebounding in 2021 but not as steeply as their future life ratings. And current life ratings are not at a low point; that occurred in 2020, during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.
These results are a part of the Gallup 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, a probability-based panel encompassing all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
To measure current as well as future life satisfaction, respondents were asked:
- “Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you, and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?”
- “On which step do you think you will stand about five years from now?”
Recent Declines in Future Life Ratings Greatest Among Democrats, Hispanic Adults
Black adults — historically the most likely of the United States’ three major race/ethnicity groups to have high future optimism — had the greatest erosion in optimism between 2021 and 2024. But Hispanic adults showed a larger drop than Black adults did in the past year.
All three major political identity groups dropped about five percentage points in future life optimism from 2021 to 2024. However, the groups showed differing patterns of change in 2025, the first year of President Donald Trump’s second administration. Democrats tumbled another 7.6 points in 2025, while independents edged down another 1.5 points and Republicans remained essentially unchanged.
It is common for life ratings to swing negatively or positively among political partisans when party control of the White House changes. Between 2020 and 2021, Democrats’ optimism grew by 4.4 points, while Republicans’ dropped by 5.9, mostly canceling each other out across the full population.
Overall Life Evaluation Closes Out 2025 Near Record Low
As of Quarter 4, 2025, the percentage of American adults who rate both their current and future lives high enough to be classified as “thriving” dropped to 48.0%, down over 11 points from the 59.2% high measured in June 2021, six months after the first public rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine. The latest estimate is the sixth lowest of 176 (primarily monthly or quarterly) measurement periods dating to January 2008. The five measurements that were lower were during either the Great Recession (October, November and December 2008) or the early stages of the pandemic (in the first and the last half of April 2020).
For its Life Evaluation Index, Gallup classifies respondents as "thriving," "struggling" or "suffering," according to how they rate their current and future lives on a ladder scale with steps numbered from zero to 10, based on the Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale. Those who rate their current life a 7 or higher and their anticipated life in five years an 8 or higher are classified as thriving. While, as noted above, both the current life and future life ratings have declined since 2021, the future life metric has had an outsized influence over eroding thriving rates because it has declined much more substantially. This contrasts significantly with 2020, when the thriving rate plunged below 50%, ultimately tying its all-time low of 46.4% — a result of a major drop in current life satisfaction amid a modest improvement in future life satisfaction, which culminated in a near-record high for the latter that year.
Implications
The drop in future life ratings since 2021 likely indicates that multiple mechanisms are at work. For example, the steep drop from 2021 to 2023 — even as the pandemic was gradually receding — closely coincides with annual inflation rates that peaked at 7.0% in 2021 and eased only slightly to 6.5% in 2022, creating significant affordability challenges for U.S. consumers that continue to this day.
During the four-year period from 2021 to 2024, the drop in optimism was greatest among Black adults, who disproportionately suffered the effects of inflation, with elevated levels of food, housing and healthcare insecurity compared with their White and Hispanic counterparts. But no differences were found among Democrats, Republicans and independents, suggesting that national challenges like a pandemic or inflation will have a similar negative influence on the optimism of Americans, regardless of political identity.
This dynamic changed in 2024 and 2025, with the pandemic over and inflation significantly lowered (albeit still elevated). During this period, the reduction in life optimism has been much greater among Hispanic adults. More generally, the sharp divergence of changes in future life ratings for Democrats compared with independents or Republicans in this latter period versus the former also suggests that the change in political administrations is a contributing factor, a mirror image of the changes that occurred between 2020 and 2021.
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