Eighteen percent of Americans give a positive rating to the current state of the economy, according to a new survey released Sunday.
In the NBC News poll, 1 percent of respondents say they would rate the current state of the economy as “excellent,” and 17 percent say they would rate the economy as “good.”
Meanwhile, 43 percent say the current state of the economy is “poor,” and 39 percent say it’s “only fair.”
The numbers fall short of the responses given in polls taken at around the same time of former President Biden’s term in office and of President Trump’s first term.
In April 2021, a few months into the Biden administration, approximately a third of responses rated the economy as positive — including 4 percent who said it was “excellent” and 30 percent said it was “good.”
The share of respondents in 2021 who rated the economy as “poor” was 22 percent — half of what it is today — while those who said it was “only fair” was 41 percent, similar to today’s.
In April 2017, after Trump took office for the first time, economic outlooks were significantly brighter than they are today: 2 percent described the state of the economy as “excellent,” 36 percent said it was “good,” 43 percent said it was “only fair,” and only 17 percent said it was “poor.”
NBC noted that the current numbers under Trump are still higher than at Biden’s lowest point, in terms of economic attitudes, but added it was the lowest in their polling since 2014.
The latest NBC survey was conducted on March 7-11, 2025, and included 1,000 registered voters. The margin of error is 3.1 percentage points.
