Public trust in the United States government
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.
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.
Sources and processing
This data is based on the following sources
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.
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/20260217-112422/grapher/public-trust-in-government.html [online resource] (archived on February 17, 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 DataFull 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 February 18, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260217-112422/grapher/public-trust-in-government.html (archived on February 17, 2026).