Americans continue to drink less alcohol than ever before, according to a new Gallup poll.
Only 54% of U.S. adults surveyed by the analytics firm in July said they ever drink alcohol—the same share as last year and the lowest recorded since Gallup began surveying Americans on this topic in 1939, says Lydia Saad, Gallup’s director of U.S. social research.
“We saw a significant decline in people’s use of alcohol last year, but whether that was a one-time reaction or a trend, we had to wait and see,” Saad says. “This year’s result tells us that whatever is happening out there is a sustained change. Drinking has gone down across all age groups.”
More public awareness of alcohol’s health risks could be prompting Americans to drink less, the poll results suggest. A little more than half of Americans surveyed this year said that alcohol is “bad for health,” compared to the less than 30% of people who said that a decade ago; and 86% of people polled said they had heard of recent studies about the long-term health effects of alcohol—a 7% increase from 2024. Drinking alcohol has been linked to several forms of cancer, as well as higher risks of liver and heart disease, among other health effects.
“The decline in alcohol use coincides with a sharp increase in concern about the health risks of drinking,” Saad says.
But researchers who study alcohol say the poll results don’t provide a complete picture of alcohol use in America. While drinking might be declining overall, alcohol remains the country’s second-deadliest drug, behind tobacco. Alcohol kills about 178,000 people yearly, and harmful drinking remains a challenge for many people.
“Many people are changing their attitudes towards drinking and intoxication for health reasons, which means that the number of people who say they drink may be declining because lighter drinkers who are more health conscious and more capable of changing their drinking are maybe choosing to cut back or not drink at all,” says Thomas Babor, a professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine who studies alcohol and alcohol addiction.
“But the rates of drinking and drinking problems remain unacceptably high” among some groups, including college students and older people, Babor says. “The big picture is: alcohol consumption is one of the biggest risk factors for chronic diseases and many other health conditions.”
According to the 2025 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), 44% of U.S. teenagers and adults who drank alcohol said they had engaged in binge drinking in the past month, and about 10%—about 14.5 million people—said they engaged in heavy drinking, defined as binge drinking on 5 or more days in the past 30 days.
NSDUH results show that the numbers of binge and heavy drinkers declined overall since 2021. But percentages for binge and heavy alcohol use among underage drinkers didn’t change from 2021 to 2025. Among people aged 65 and older, about 10% in 2025 said they engaged in binge drinking, compared to about 12% in 2021.
In the new Gallup poll, people were asked if they “sometimes drink more alcoholic beverages than you think you should.” Some 13% of respondents said yes to that question, another record low, according to Gallup.
More research is needed to better understand why people are drinking less, says Traci Toomey, a public health policy expert at the University of Minnesota who studies alcohol and cannabis. Health concerns are likely a factor, but there may be other reasons too, she says.
It isn’t clear if an increase in cannabis use, for example, is driving some of the decline. “We don’t know if it’s a substitution, but that’s a question we need to answer,” Toomey says.
Use of GLP-1 drugs, which studies suggest may help reduce alcohol consumption and craving in people with alcohol abuse disorder, along with higher alcohol prices and policies to curb harmful and underage drinking, may also be playing a role, she says.
Saad, of Gallup, says there could be political factors at play too. According to the new Gallup poll, alcohol use has declined significantly among Republicans and Independents, while Democrats’ alcohol consumption has remained virtually unchanged since 2023.
