How Free Is America Compared to Other Countries?

The United States ranks 15th out of 165 countries on the most comprehensive measure of overall freedom, the Human Freedom Index published by the Cato Institute and the Fraser Institute. So how free is America compared to other countries? Freer than most, but not the freest by any major independent measure, and its standing has been slipping for years. It ranks 22nd on economic freedom, 27th on rule of law, 64th on press freedom, and scores 81 out of 100 on Freedom House’s political rights and civil liberties assessment. Every one of those numbers is lower than it was five years ago.

Overall Freedom: 15th in the World

The Human Freedom Index scores 165 countries using 87 indicators across 12 categories, blending personal freedom (rule of law, security, movement, religion, association, expression, and relationships) with economic freedom (size of government, property rights, sound money, trade, and regulation). The 2025 edition, released in December 2025 with 2023 data, gave the United States 8.71 overall, with a personal freedom score of 9.15 and an economic freedom score of 8.10. The economic side is what pulls the U.S. down relative to the leaders.¹

The top ten, in order, are Switzerland (9.15), Denmark (9.03), New Zealand (9.02), Ireland (8.92), Luxembourg (8.88), Estonia (8.85), Finland (8.83), Czechia (8.82), the Netherlands (8.81), and Australia (8.79). Canada ranks 12th. Taiwan ranks 14th. Germany sits at 17th; Japan and the United Kingdom are tied at 19th.² In 2000, the U.S. was 8th on this same index.

One caveat about what this index measures: it defines freedom as “negative liberty,” the absence of coercive constraint, and explicitly excludes democracy from its calculations, reasoning that “unrestrained democracy can, in fact, be inconsistent with freedom.”¹ That’s a philosophical choice, and it means countries with strong personal and economic liberties but weaker democratic participation can still score well.

Political Rights and Civil Liberties

Freedom House’s Freedom in the World report scores 195 countries on a 0-to-100 scale across 25 indicators and classifies each as Free, Partly Free, or Not Free. In the 2026 edition, the United States scored 81, down from 84 the year before. That was one of the largest single-year drops among countries rated “Free.” Political rights fell to 32 out of 40, and civil liberties to 49 out of 60.³

Freedom House attributed the decline to the 43-day federal government shutdown of 2025 (the longest in U.S. history), an expansion of unilateral executive authority through more than 220 executive orders, weakened anticorruption safeguards, conflicts of interest involving the Trump family’s business ventures, the dismissal of inspectors general, and the reduction of the Department of Justice’s political corruption unit from 36 staff to two.³

An 81 is still “Free,” but it puts the U.S. well below dozens of peer democracies. Finland scored a perfect 100. Ireland scored 98. Canada, Denmark, and Luxembourg each scored 97. Estonia and Japan scored 96, Germany 95. The average among EU countries was 90. The U.S. score of 81 is comparable to South Africa’s.⁴⁵

Economic Freedom

The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom ranked the United States 22nd in 2026 with a score of 72.8, classifying it as “Mostly Free.” That score reflected a 2.6-point improvement, Heritage’s largest annual gain since 2001 and a reversal of a five-year slide.⁶⁷

Even with the improvement, 21 countries scored higher. Singapore led at 84.4, followed by Switzerland, Ireland, Australia, Taiwan, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, Estonia, the Netherlands, Sweden, New Zealand, Finland, Canada, Lithuania, Iceland, Chile, Cyprus, South Korea, the Czech Republic, and Mauritius. The U.S. scored well on monetary freedom and investment freedom but lost ground on trade freedom.⁸

Rule of Law

The World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index ranked the United States 27th out of 143 countries in 2025, with a score of 0.68 out of 1.0. That score fell 2.8 percent from the prior year, placing the U.S. among the index’s “Biggest Rule of Law Decliners.”⁹

The weakest area is access to civil justice. On the WJP’s measure of how accessible and affordable the civil court system is, the United States ranked 112th out of 143 countries, a drop of more than 40 places since 2015. Civil legal assistance is frequently expensive or unavailable, and the gap between wealthy and low-income Americans in their use of and satisfaction with the courts is significant.¹⁰

Press Freedom

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) ranked the United States 64th out of 180 countries on its 2026 World Press Freedom Index, down seven places from the prior year and a steep fall from 17th when the index began in 2002.¹¹

RSF pointed to systematic policies under President Trump’s second term, including repeated attacks on the press, police violence against journalists, and drastic staff cuts at the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which affected Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Clayton Weimers, RSF’s North America director, said the decline was more than the product of any one administration, citing media consolidation, the loss of journalism jobs, and eroding legal protections for reporters. The legal subscore, he said, had deteriorated the most.¹²

Where America Leads and Where It Lags

Aggregate rankings obscure the fact that freedom is not one thing. The United States leads the world on some specific dimensions and trails on others.

Speech

First Amendment protections are broader in practice than those of virtually any peer democracy. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that offensive speech is protected, and there is no federal hate speech law. EU member states, by contrast, are required under a 2008 framework decision to criminalize public incitement to violence or hatred based on race, color, religion, descent, or national or ethnic origin, and the EU’s Digital Services Act (in force since 2022) requires platforms to implement systems to remove illegal content.¹³

Guns

The United States has the world’s highest gun ownership rate, about 121 firearms per 100 residents, and relatively permissive regulation compared to other wealthy democracies. There is no federal ban on semiautomatic assault weapons or large-capacity magazines, and no federal safety training requirement. Australia mandates licensing, registration, and demonstrated “genuine need,” and has a gun death rate roughly twelve times lower than the U.S. Japan restricts civilian ownership almost entirely to shotguns and air guns with rigorous testing and annual inspections. The United Kingdom banned handguns after the 1996 Dunblane massacre.¹⁴ This is both a measure of individual liberty and a contributor to the security and safety deficits that lower the U.S. score on indexes that weigh homicide rates.

Incarceration

The U.S. incarcerates people at a rate that dwarfs every other established democracy. The Prison Policy Initiative reported 608 per 100,000 people as of 2024, far above other founding NATO members. Countries like Canada, England, Finland, and Germany rely much more on fines and warnings.¹⁵ More than five million Americans are under some form of criminal legal supervision, and nearly two million are in prisons and jails.¹⁶ Among independent democracies, no country locks up a larger share of its population.

Privacy

There is no federal U.S. data privacy law comparable to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. Instead, protections come from a patchwork of state laws. California, Virginia, and Colorado have enacted their own, but they follow an opt-out model rather than the GDPR’s opt-in approach, and they apply only to residents of those states.¹⁷ On government surveillance, programs authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and Executive Order 12333 permit broad collection of communications data. The EU’s Court of Justice struck down two successive EU-U.S. data transfer agreements (Safe Harbor in 2015, Privacy Shield in 2020) on the ground that U.S. surveillance was too sweeping and lacked adequate independent oversight for EU citizens.¹⁸

What Americans Say About Their Own Freedom

In Gallup’s World Poll, 72 percent of Americans in 2024 said they were satisfied with their freedom to choose what to do with their lives, well below the U.S. average of 83 percent between 2007 and 2021. That nine-point decline since 2021 was among the largest recorded globally, exceeded only by Pakistan and Croatia. The global median across 142 countries was 81 percent; the median among OECD nations was 86 percent.¹⁹

By 2025, roughly three in four Americans were satisfied, still below the updated global average of 82 percent. The drop was driven mainly by women and people under 50. Among women, satisfaction fell to 66 percent in 2024, compared with 77 percent for men, the widest gender gap Gallup has recorded and one of the largest globally.¹⁹

The Direction of Travel

Every major freedom index has moved the same way for the United States in recent years. Freedom House has documented an erosion of democratic institutions tied to political polarization, partisan pressure on elections, growing wealth disparities, the influence of money in politics, and challenges to academic and press freedom.²⁰ The Human Freedom Index recorded a slight U.S. decline from 2022 to 2023.¹ The WJP Rule of Law Index placed the U.S. among its biggest decliners.⁹

This is not happening in isolation. Freedom House has now documented 20 consecutive years of worldwide democratic decline, with 19 countries falling from “Partly Free” to “Not Free” since 2005 and only nine moving the other way.⁴ Global human freedom fell from 6.97 in 2019 to 6.81 in 2023 and remains below pre-pandemic levels.² RSF says press freedom is at a 25-year low, with over half of the 180 countries it surveys now classified as having a “difficult” or “very serious” environment.¹¹

The United States still scores well above the global average on every major index. Among the established democracies it typically compares itself to, though, it finishes in the middle of the pack or lower, and the trajectory is downward.

1
Fraser Institute. Human Freedom Index 2025
2
Cato Institute. Human Freedom Index 2025
3
Freedom House. United States: Freedom in the World 2026
4
Freedom House. Freedom in the World 2026
5
Freedom House. Freedom in the World Country Scores
6
Heritage Foundation. 2026 Index of Economic Freedom: United States
7
Heritage Foundation. 2026 Index of Economic Freedom
8
Heritage Foundation. 2026 Index of Economic Freedom Highlights
9
World Justice Project. WJP Rule of Law Index 2025
10
National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel. U.S. Rank on Access to Civil Justice in Rule of Law Index
11
RSF. 2026 RSF Index: Press Freedom at 25-Year Low
12
Democracy Now. Clayton Weimers, Reporters Without Borders
13
European Parliament. EU-US Approaches to Online Content Regulation
14
Council on Foreign Relations. US Gun Policy: Global Comparisons
15
Prison Policy Initiative. States of Incarceration: The Global Context 2024
16
The Sentencing Project. Mass Incarceration Trends
17
Bloomberg Law. Privacy Laws: US vs EU GDPR
18
CIRSD. EU Privacy Law and US Surveillance
19
Gallup. Land of the Free: Fewer Americans Agree
20
Freedom House. United States: Freedom in the World 2025