Drinking in America has hit a record low, according to a new poll.
The percentage of Americans who say they drink alcohol sank to 54% in 2025, a Gallup pollreleased Wednesday shows. That's the lowest point on record in the 90 years since the survey's inception. The drinking rate dipped from 62% in 2023 to 58% in 2024 before dropping another four percentage points in the last last year.
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These rates were way down from the peak of 71% of self-reported drinkers in 1976, 1977 and 1978.
The declines may have to do with recent research suggesting that any level of alcohol consumption is bad for health, according to the survey.
In January, then-Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory warning that alcohol consumption puts people at higher risk of seven types of cancer. Murthy called for warning labels on alcohol products similar to those required on tobacco products. The advisory followed the World Health Organization's determination in 2023 that no level of alcohol consumption is safe.
This messaging seems to have taken hold with a majority of Americans surveyed – 53% said drinking even one to two drinks a day is bad for one's health. That is up from 45% in 2024 and 39% in 2023 – and from 25% for the decade from 2001 to 2011, according to the Gallup poll.
Even drinkers are consuming less alcohol. A record low of 24% of drinkers said they had had a drink in the past 24 hours, and 40% of drinkers said it had been more than a week since their last drink, the highest percentage since 2000.
The number of young people who said they drink continued a downward trend, too. While 59% of people ages 18 to 24 reported drinking in 2023, 50% of young people reported drinking in 2025.
The poll also recorded that 66% of young adults said drinking in moderation was harmful, compared to approximately 50% of people 35 and older.
"They grew up with that safe-level messaging, whereas a lot of us did not," Sara McMullin, a psychology professor at Webster University, told NPR.
The fact that fewer young people are drinking may have to do with how isolated adolescents were during the pandemic, Johannes Thrul, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told The New York Times.
The Gallup poll concluded that lower drinking rates could not be attributed to shifts to other drugs, such as marijuana. Recreational marijuana use is now legal in about half of the country.
"Although marijuana use is higher today than a decade ago, it has been fairly steady over the past four years and thus doesn't appear to be a factor in people choosing not to drink alcohol," according to the survey.
This conclusion contradicts other recentresearchthat shows cannabis use has risen as drinking rates have fallen.
A 2024 study that used data from another national survey, conducted between 2018 and 2022, found that heavy drinking – defined as four or more drinks a day for women and five or more drinks a day for men – spiked during the pandemic. The highest increases were among adults aged 40 to 49, according to that study.