How have Freedom House scores for the US changed from 2010 to 2025?
Executive summary
Freedom House publishes annual Freedom in the World scores and a 0–100 aggregate “total democracy” metric processed and visualized by outlets such as Our World in Data, and publicly available reporting shows the United States has remained in the “Free” category through 2025 even as numeric scores have shown modest movement downward from the early 2010s to mid‑2020s [1] [2] [3]. The most recent public figure cited in reporting is an 84/100 total score for the United States in the 2025 Freedom in the World report [4].
1. What the scores measure and how to read them
Freedom House’s Freedom in the World aggregates 25 indicators across political rights and civil liberties into a single 0–100-style total (political rights max 40, civil liberties max 60 in Freedom House’s own framework) and is widely reprocessed by outlets such as Our World in Data, which explains the composition and interpretation of the score—higher equals more freedom—so year‑to‑year comparisons reflect changes across elections, rule of law, freedom of expression, and personal autonomy [1].
2. The headline trend through 2025: still “Free,” but lower than a decade earlier
Reporting and compiled data indicate that the United States remained categorized as “Free” in the 2025 report, but numeric scores show a modest decline from the early 2010s into the 2020s; for example, public reporting cites the U.S. total at 84/100 in 2025, compared with an 83/100 number for 2024 mentioned alongside that series, reflecting year‑to‑year fluctuations and a generally lower plateau than some peer democracies [4] [3]. Freedom House’s own site and processed datasets document these annual ratings and note the organization’s thematic focus on political rights and civil liberties when calculating each country’s score [5] [2] [1].
3. What drove the changes that are identified in reporting
Analysts and Freedom House’s narrative link score movements to discrete pressures on democratic norms—contested elections, political polarization, limits on civil liberties, and challenges around rule of law and free expression are routinely cited as the kinds of factors that produce downgrades or stagnation in the U.S. score, and Freedom House’s methodology explicitly ties scores to such indicators rather than to single events [1] [2]. Reporting that places the U.S. slightly below many major European democracies in numeric rankings underscores that relative positioning—rather than a categorical reclassification—has been the dominant story through 2025 [3].
4. Methodological caveats and competing perspectives
Freedom House’s measures are widely used but contested: scholars and critics warn that methodology changes over time can complicate cross‑time comparisons and that political biases or alignment with U.S. foreign‑policy perspectives may influence ratings and how changes are interpreted; Freedom House defends its evidence‑based approach, while academic critiques urge caution using the series as an unbroken, politically neutral time series [6] [7]. This dispute matters here because assessing the precise magnitude of change in U.S. scores from 2010 to 2025 requires careful accounting for methodology shifts and access to the year‑by‑year numeric series compiled by Freedom House or processed datasets such as Our World in Data [6] [1].
5. What the available reporting cannot tell us cleanly
The reviewed sources establish the U.S. remained “Free” through 2025 and provide headline totals (for example, a reported 84/100 in 2025), yet the set of snippets supplied does not include a complete, year‑by‑year table of Freedom House scores for the United States from 2010 through 2025; therefore it is not possible, based solely on these documents, to enumerate precise annual point changes across the whole period without consulting Freedom House’s archived reports or processed datasets such as Our World in Data’s annual series [4] [1] [5]. Readers should consult Freedom House’s country scores page and the Our World in Data Freedom House grapher for the exact annual series to perform a precise numerical trend analysis [5] [1].