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.
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.
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“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
She notes, however, that “we haven’t seen strong anti-alcohol messages out of the [Trump] Administration.” In January, the administration released updated dietary guidelines that no longer specified a daily limit for alcohol consumption.
“In the best-case scenario, I don’t think you should drink alcohol, but it does allow people an excuse to bond and socialize, and there’s probably nothing healthier than having a good time with friends in a safe way,” he said. The World Health Organization, supported by emerging research, has asserted that no amount of alcohol is safe for health.
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