Are your finances getting worse? Americans more pessimistic than ever, poll says

Americans are more pessimistic than ever when it comes to their financial outlook, according to new polling.

In the latest Gallup poll, 53% of respondents said they think “their personal financial situation as a whole” is getting worse, marking the highest share recorded saying that since 2001, when the question was first asked.

In contrast, a substantially smaller share, 38%, said they believe their financial situation is getting better, and 8% said it is staying the same.

There have only been a handful of periods over the past 25 years when pessimism greatly exceeded optimism in this way. They include 2008 and 2009, following the global recession, while another was in 2020, during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The third came in 2022 and 2023, as high inflation led to soaring prices later in the pandemic.

The poll — which sampled 1,006 U.S. adults April 1 to April 14 — found the results differed significantly based on partisan affiliation.

The vast majority of Democrats, 76%, said their financial situation is getting worse, while just 28% of Republicans said the same. In 2024, though, these numbers were reversed, with 21% of Democrats and 68% of Republicans saying their situation was getting worse.

This trend follows “the expected partisan pattern that occurs when the party of the sitting president changes,” according to Gallup.

There were also slight differences in results based on income. Among Americans making less than $50,000, 63% said their personal financial situation is getting worse, up from 57% in 2024.

Meanwhile, 45% of those making $100,000 or more said their situation is deteriorating, up from 40% in 2024, according to the poll, which has a margin of error of 4 percentage points.

Other findings

The poll — which comes several weeks after President Donald Trump levied sweeping tariffs on most of the world, sending global markets into disarray — also found other economic indicators were flashing red.

This was particularly true when it came to the stock market. A majority of respondents, 58%, said that, over the next six months, they expect the stock market to go down a little or a lot. This marks a reversal from January, when 61% of respondents said the market would go up.

Additionally, 58% of respondents said they believe it is a bad time “to find a quality job,” while just 38% said it is a good time. By comparison, in January, the results were closely divided, with 48% saying it is a good time and 45% saying it is a bad time.

“This is the most pessimistic outlook for jobs that Gallup has recorded in four years, since January 2021, when the nation was still experiencing high unemployment related to the COVID-19 pandemic,” according to the polling organization.

Despite these results, Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index (ECI) — which summarizes respondents’ evaluations of prevailing economic conditions — has hardly budged.

The ECI, which has a range of +100 to -100, measured at -22 in the latest poll, down slightly from -20 in March and -19 in February.

“In Gallup’s trend of these measures since 1992, the highest ECI score is +56, in January 2000, and the lowest is -72, in October 2008,” the organization said.

This story was originally published April 22, 2025 at 11:40 AM with the headline "Are your finances getting worse? Americans more pessimistic than ever, poll says."