The OECD Survey on Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions (“Trust Survey”) has become the preeminent measurement tool for understanding the factors driving trust in government and the factors diminishing it. This understanding remains as critical for governments today as it was in 2021, when the Trust Survey first launched, as governments continue to face the challenges of new crises, ageing populations, technological change, limited fiscal space, and high public expectations. The OECD Trust Survey is an important component of the OECD Public Governance Committee’s Reinforcing Democracy and Government Unstuck initiatives and relies on the OECD’s longstanding Framework on Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions.
Building on the 2021 and 2023 Trust Surveys, the 2025 Trust Survey continues to offer robust, internationally comparable evidence on people’s perceptions of public institutions across countries. These perceptions, based on different levels of knowledge, shape people’s lived experiences of public governance and ultimately influence their trust in public institutions. This is the value of a perception survey: it captures how government action is received and interpreted by the people as compared to their expectations, complementing performance indicators that help governments measure how systems do in practice.
The results presented in this report cover a representative sample of the populations of 33 OECD Member countries and five OECD accession candidate countries (three from Europe and two from Latin America and the Caribbean). The survey is part of an expanding global effort. Since its launch with 22 countries in 2021, the Trust Survey has grown into the Global Trust Survey Project covering 42 countries, including a regional edition in Latin America and the Caribbean which was launched in 2025. This expansion demonstrates both the relevance of the OECD Framework and the strong demand for comparable, actionable data on trust worldwide.
The 2025 Trust Survey maintains the same core methodology and questionnaire as in previous waves, ensuring continuity and enabling the analysis of trends over time. At the same time, it introduces new questions that deepen our understanding of emerging governance challenges, including perceptions of the role of artificial intelligence in the public sector, barriers to and impacts of political participation, and drivers of trust in legislatures as key institutions of representative democracy. These additions reflect evolving policy priorities while preserving the survey’s comparability and analytical strength. Most participating countries were surveyed in September to November 2025, with data collection in Brazil and Peru taking place in May and June 2025.
The OECD Secretariat acknowledges the strong engagement and contributions of delegates from the Public Governance Committee and the Global Trust Survey Project, at both senior and technical levels. Their collaboration has been instrumental in ensuring the quality, relevance, and timely delivery of this work. The continued commitment of participating countries underscores the shared recognition that measuring and understanding trust and its drivers is essential to supporting reform efforts in the increasingly complex policy environment faced by democracies.