Americans’ Optimism About the Future Has Slipped Sharply in Five Years
A new Gallup poll shows that American confidence in the future has hit a record low. In 2025, just 59.2% of U.S. adults said they expect to be living a high-quality life five years from now, the lowest figure recorded in nearly two decades of tracking and a 3.5-percentage-point slide from where things stood just one year earlier.
Zooming out, the decline looks even steeper. Since 2020, future life optimism has fallen a total of 9.1 percentage points, which Gallup projects translates to roughly 24.5 million fewer Americans who feel hopeful about what’s ahead. Most of that erosion happened between 2021 and 2023, years when inflation peaked at 7.0% and remained elevated at 6.5% the following year.
Dan Witters, research director of the Gallup National Health and Well-Being Index, told Fortune that those inflation years left a lasting mark on Americans’ outlook. Economic pressure around everyday essentials, including food, fuel, gas, and healthcare, he said, “really can have a deleterious effect.” He also noted that future optimism is now eroding at a rate faster than how Americans evaluate their lives in the present.
A Record Low Built on Years of Financial Strain
The 2025 results come from 22,125 U.S. adults interviewed across four quarterly rounds throughout the year, covering all 50 states and Washington, D.C. To measure well-being, Gallup uses the Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale, a zero-to-10 ladder where respondents mark where they feel they stand today and where they expect to land five years from now.
Using that ladder, Gallup groups Americans into three categories: thriving, struggling, or suffering. Reaching the thriving threshold means scoring at least a seven on current life and projecting at least an eight on future life. Only 48% of Americans cleared that bar in 2025, a drop of more than 11 percentage points from the high point reached in June 2021, six months after the first public rollout of COVID-19 vaccines.
The sharpest erosion traces back to the inflation years. Future life optimism stood at 67.3% in 2021, then slid to 61.9% by 2023, covering a stretch when (annual inflation rates) remained at 7.0% in 2021 and 6.5% in 2022. Even as inflation cooled to around 2.5% by August 2024, future life ratings continued to fall, dropping another 3.5 points by 2025.
The Decline Wasn’t Felt Equally Across All Americans
Among the country’s major racial and ethnic groups, Hispanic adults saw the steepest single-year decline in future optimism, dropping six percentage points between 2024 and 2025. White adults followed with a decline of 4.6 points, while Black Americans saw a smaller but still notable dip of 2.2 points over the same period, according to Gallup’s 2025 National Health and Well-Being Index.
Black adults had experienced the greatest overall erosion in optimism between 2021 and 2024, a stretch during which they disproportionately bore the weight of rising costs, with higher rates of food, housing, and healthcare strain than other groups, according to Gallup. Notably, during that earlier four-year window, the decline in optimism was broadly similar across political identities, with no meaningful gap between Democrats, Republicans, and independents.
What’s driving the current thriving low differs from what drove the 2020 low. During the pandemic, the drop was primarily caused by a sharp decline in how people rated their lives in the present. In 2025, current life ratings have also dipped but far less steeply, with the forward-looking measure accounting for most of the overall decline, according to Gallup.
The Thriving Rate Has Only Been This Low During the Great Recession and Early Pandemic
To put the current reading in context, Gallup’s thriving rate has reached its sixth-lowest point across 176 measurements dating back to January 2008. The only five lower readings occurred during the Great Recession in late 2008 or the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2020, the two periods in the poll’s history where the rate has previously fallen below its current level.
Gallup’s report notes that the future life metric’s steep decline since 2021 has had an outsized influence on the thriving rate overall, pulling it down far more than the comparatively modest drop in how Americans assess their current lives. The report points to affordability challenges as a key driver, describing pressures that, according to Gallup, continue to affect U.S. consumers to this day.
Gallup has tracked American life satisfaction since 2008, covering the Great Recession and a global pandemic, and the index now shows future life optimism at the lowest point in its history. Witters, speaking with Fortune, captured where the concern now sits: Americans’ optimism for the future, he said, is “eroding at a rate that’s kind of significantly greater than what we find with how they evaluate their current lives.”