With a score of 64 out of 100, the United States is now at its lowest point ever in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) for 2025, coming in 29th out of 182 countries. This is a drop from last year’s score and position, which shows that experts and business leaders are becoming more worried about how people see corruption in the public sector. The index, which shows how corrupt people think things are on a scale from 0 (very corrupt) to 100 (very clean), shows a worrying trend for the US since the methodology was changed in 2012.
The global average CPI score dropped to 42, and 122 countries scored below 50. This shows that there are a lot of problems with corruption around the world. The US’s score went down from 65 to 64 in 2024, putting it behind countries like Estonia and Taiwan and on the same level as the Bahamas. Anticorruption efforts are getting worse in democracies around the world, including the US. This makes the fight against corruption harder.
Experts say that the US’s CPI drop is mostly due to weakening institutional checks, political polarization, and high-profile scandals that have made people less trusting of public institutions. Transparency International says that a lack of leadership in democracies makes it harder to enforce international standards against corruption. Since 2017, the US has not been in the top 20 “cleanest” countries. This year’s score is the worst under the current system.
Countries with high scores, like Denmark (90), have strong rule-of-law systems, which is very different from the US’s decline. The CPI is a very important tool for businesses and investors to use when they want to figure out how likely it is that there is corruption in public sectors around the world. As President Trump starts his second term, dealing with these perceptions could be very important for restoring the US’s reputation.
