With tax day for 2026 just five days away, Gallup pollsters find that nearly six in 10 Americans say their taxes are too high — the fourth straight year that the share of people who think they pay too much has hovered at or near 60%. Those results don’t vary much by income level, though they do differ somewhat based on political affiliation, with 64% of independents, 60% of Republicans and 49% of Democrats calling their taxes too high. The Republican share has dropped from 71% in 2023, while the Democratic result has risen from 41% that year.
Gallup says the share of people who now call their taxes too high is well above the roughly 50% average seen in its surveys in the early 2000s, following President George W. Bush’s 2001 tax cuts. But it is still lower than the levels seen in surveys from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, when the percentage of people who said their taxes were too high regularly topped 60%.
Gallup’s Lydia Saad notes that sentiment around tax levels shifted significantly after those Bush-era tax cuts. “Between 2001 and 2003, spanning the passage of George W. Bush’s first tax cut, the percentage saying taxes are too high fell from 65% to 47%, while people’s belief that their taxes are fair increased from 51% to 64%,” Saad writes. The 2017 tax cuts enacted under President Trump similarly helped push the “too high” complaints in Gallup’s polling to recent lows of 45% in 2018 and 2019.
“The positive impact of that legislation on public perceptions of their taxes faded in 2021, as Republicans became more likely to believe their taxes were too high after Joe Biden became president,” Saad notes. “As high inflation took hold in 2022 and continued in 2023, dissatisfaction rose further as cumulatively higher prices weighed on consumers.”
The tax cuts enacted as part of last summer’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act have not translated to a boost in Americans’ views of their taxes — at least not yet, based on the Gallup data. In the latest survey, nearly half of Americans, 47%, called their tax burden fair, near the 45% low from 1999, while 49% said it was not fair, close to the 51% high found in 2023.
Gallup’s survey was conducted from March 2 to 18 with a random sample of 1,000 adults. The margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.
