Presidents Ranked by Veto Record: Who Wielded the Pen, Who Got Overruled

The official count

The Senate keeps the ledger. From 1789 through July 2026, presidents have vetoed 2,599 bills: 1,533 by regular veto and 1,066 by pocket veto. Congress has overridden 112, which works out to 7.3 percent of regular vetoes, the only kind that can be overridden (Senate.gov, Vetoes, 1789 to Present). Those four numbers frame everything in this report.

The distribution is wildly top-heavy. Franklin Roosevelt and Grover Cleveland together account for 1,219 vetoes, roughly 47 percent of every veto ever cast. Seven presidents never vetoed anything at all. The framework pays no attention to which party a president belonged to; the pen has been wielded hard and been overruled hard on both sides of the aisle.

The veto power itself is spelled out in one sentence of the Constitution. Article I, Section 7 gives the president ten days, Sundays excepted, to return a bill with objections, and requires a two-thirds vote in each chamber to override. That two-thirds bar is the entire drama of this report. It is deliberately hard to clear, and the record proves it: in 237 years Congress has cleared it only 112 times, against 1,533 regular vetoes. The override is the rarest routine event in American government, and every one of the 112 is a documented moment when a supermajority of both houses judged a president wrong enough to legislate over his signature (Senate.gov; CRS RS22188).

Who wielded the pen hardest

Franklin Roosevelt is first by a wide margin: 635 vetoes in twelve years, an average of one roughly every week of his presidency, with only nine overridden (Senate.gov). One of those nine was historic in its own right: the Revenue Act of 1944, the first revenue bill ever passed over a presidential veto.

Cleveland's 584 is the more remarkable number per year. His first term alone produced 414 vetoes, still the record for a single four-year term. The bulk were private pension bills for Civil War veterans that Cleveland judged fraudulent or unsupported, and he read the case files himself. Congress overrode him just twice in that term (Senate.gov). Whatever one thinks of the policy, the volume is documented and unmatched.

Truman's 250 and Eisenhower's 181 round out the heavyweight class, and Eisenhower's split is notable: 108 of his 181 were pocket vetoes, bills killed by silence at the end of a session. The pocket veto leaves Congress no override, which is why the override-rate math in this report uses regular vetoes only (CRS RS22188).

Below the top four, the volume drops off a cliff. Grant's 93 is less than a sixth of Roosevelt's total, and no president since Reagan's 78 has broken 50. The gap is not an accident of temperament. It tracks the changing shape of federal legislation. In Cleveland's day, Congress passed thousands of private bills, individual pension claims, land grants, and personal relief measures, that a diligent president could reject one at a time. Cleveland treated the pension rolls as a fraud-detection problem and read the files himself, which is how one man produced 414 vetoes in a single term (Senate.gov). When Congress reformed private-bill practice in the 20th century and the administrative agencies took over case-by-case adjudication, the raw material for high-volume vetoing simply vanished. The modern president vetoes a handful of major public laws, not hundreds of private ones, and the totals reflect the change more than they reflect any president's appetite for confrontation.

Who got overruled

Andrew Johnson owns the override record and it is not close: 15 of his 21 regular vetoes were overridden, 71 percent (Senate.gov). Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Reconstruction Acts, and the Tenure of Office Act over his signature, then impeached him when he defied the last of these. For roughly three years, the country was effectively governed by a two-thirds coalition legislating past the president.

Ford and Truman tie for second at 12 overrides each, but the stories differ. Truman's dozen came across eight years and included Taft-Hartley (1947), which still governs American labor law, and the McCarran-Walter immigration act (1952). Ford's dozen came in 29 months. An appointed president with no electoral mandate faced a post-Watergate Congress and used the veto 66 times as his main lever; Congress beat him on a quarter of his regular vetoes (Senate.gov).

Franklin Pierce's record is the worst by rate: five of nine regular vetoes overridden, 56 percent, all five on internal improvement bills in 1856 (Senate.gov). And the single most consequential override belongs to Nixon's ledger: the War Powers Resolution of November 1973, passed over his veto, still constrains every commander in chief.

The overrides that stuck are a short list of laws that shaped the country over their authors' objections. Congress put Prohibition enforcement into law by overriding Wilson's veto of the Volstead Act in 1919. It set American labor policy for three generations by overriding Truman on Taft-Hartley in 1947. It imposed sanctions on apartheid South Africa by overriding Reagan in 1986, the first override of a foreign policy veto in the 20th century. And it reasserted the congressional war power by overriding Nixon in 1973. Four presidents of both parties, four overrides, four durable statutes that still govern. The override is rare, but when it lands it tends to land on something that lasts, because it takes a supermajority consensus to produce one, and consensus of that size does not form around trivia (Senate.gov).

The zero club and the vanishing veto

Seven presidents never vetoed a single bill: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, and James Garfield (Senate.gov). Two of those served under a month and a year respectively, but Jefferson's eight veto-free years were a deliberate constitutional philosophy: he believed the veto was reserved for unconstitutional bills, and none in his judgment crossed the line.

The modern story is the veto's near-disappearance. George W. Bush vetoed 12 bills, Obama 12, Trump 10 in his first term, Biden 13, and Trump 2 so far in his second (Senate.gov). Compare Ford's 66 in under three years. The cause is documented in congressional output itself: polarized parties rarely pass bills a hostile president would need to veto, because such bills die in the other chamber or by filibuster first. The veto fight has moved upstream into Congress. Trump's two second-term vetoes, both issued December 29, 2025, struck bipartisan bills on a Colorado water pipeline (H.R. 131) and Miccosukee Tribe lands in Florida (H.R. 504), and neither has been overridden as of July 2026 (Senate.gov; NPR, December 31, 2025).

Jefferson's zero deserves a closer look, because it was a philosophy, not an accident. He believed the veto was reserved for bills the president judged unconstitutional, and in eight years he found none that crossed the line, so he never used it (Senate.gov). That narrow reading held for the office's first four decades until Jackson demolished it in 1832 by vetoing the Bank recharter on frank policy grounds, arguing that the president's independent judgment about the public good was reason enough to reject a law Congress had passed (National Constitution Center). The distance between Jefferson's zero and Jackson's Bank veto is the distance between two theories of the presidency, and every high-volume president on this table governs on Jackson's side of that line. The vanishing modern veto is thus a return, in raw numbers if not in theory, to the restraint of the founding era, even as the threatened veto quietly does more work than ever.

The pocket veto and the silent kill

The subscores surface a fact the headline numbers hide: several high-volume presidents ran almost no override risk because they killed bills by silence. The pocket veto occurs when a president holds a bill unsigned and Congress adjourns before the ten-day window closes; the bill dies, and there is nothing to override (CRS RS22188). McKinley used it for 36 of his 42 vetoes and earns a Pocket-Veto Reliance subscore of 18, the highest on the board, paired with a perfect Override Resistance mark of 20 because he was never overridden at all. Eisenhower's 108 pocket vetoes out of 181 give him a Pocket-Veto Reliance mark of 15 and an Override Resistance mark of 18.

This is why the report computes override rate on regular vetoes only. A president who leans on the pocket veto is not more skilled at avoiding overrides; he has simply chosen an instrument that cannot be overridden. Coolidge, with 30 pocket vetoes out of 50, and Benjamin Harrison, with 25 of 44, both benefit from the same structural shield. The Override Resistance subscore rewards low override rates, but the Pocket-Veto Reliance subscore stands beside it precisely so a reader can see whether the resistance was earned in open combat, as with George H. W. Bush's 3.4 percent rate against a hostile Congress, or bought with silence, as with McKinley's zero.

Volume as strength, volume as weakness

The most important lesson in the subscores is that Veto Volume means opposite things at opposite ends of the table. Roosevelt's 20 out of 20 reflects total legislative dominance: he could veto freely because a Democratic Congress made overrides nearly impossible, and his 2.4 percent override rate proves it. His high Veto Volume and high Override Resistance marks reinforce each other, the signature of a strong president using a strong hand.

Ford's low Veto Volume mark of 3 tells the reverse story, and his Override Resistance mark of 6 confirms it. He cast 66 vetoes in 29 months not from strength but from having no other tool: an appointed president with no electoral mandate, facing a post-Watergate Congress with veto-proof margins, could do nothing but say no and watch Congress override a quarter of the time (Senate.gov). The raw veto count cannot distinguish a Roosevelt from a Ford. The pairing of Veto Volume with Override Resistance can. When both meters are full, the president dominated. When volume is high and resistance is low, the president was cornered. Reagan sits in a third position: moderate volume, low resistance, high Historical Weight, a president whose vetoes Congress judged worth the extraordinary effort of overriding on apartheid sanctions and civil rights, spending real supermajorities to do it.

What the veto record actually measures

Veto volume is not a virtue score. It measures friction between the branches and a president's willingness to spend political capital on saying no. Cleveland's 584 vetoes reflect a president at war with pension fraud in his own era's spending. FDR's 635 reflect total legislative dominance; he could veto freely because overrides were nearly impossible. Ford's 66 reflect weakness, not strength, a president with no other tool.

Override counts measure something cleaner: the moments Congress mustered a two-thirds supermajority in both chambers against a sitting president. That has happened only 112 times in 237 years (Senate.gov). Each one is a documented constitutional event, and the presidents who accumulated them, Johnson with 15, Truman and Ford with 12, were presidents whose vetoes Congress judged worth the extraordinary effort of overruling. The pen is powerful. The record shows exactly when it was not powerful enough.

Two structural notes complete the picture. First, the pocket veto, killing a bill by inaction when Congress adjourns, accounts for 1,066 of the 2,599 total vetoes, and it is absolute: no override is possible (CRS RS22188). Presidents who leaned on it, McKinley with 36 of his 42, Eisenhower with 108 of his 181, ran essentially no override risk by design. Second, the threatened veto never appears in these tables at all. The Statement of Administration Policy, the formal document by which modern presidents warn Congress that a bill will be vetoed, kills or reshapes far more legislation than actual vetoes do, and it leaves no Senate ledger entry. The official count in this report is therefore a floor on veto power, not a ceiling. What it measures with precision is the visible collisions, 2,599 of them, and the 112 times in 237 years that Congress won the collision outright (Senate.gov).

Read together, the four subscores answer a question the raw totals cannot: was a president's veto record a display of strength, a symptom of isolation, or a matter of historical consequence. Roosevelt scores high on volume and resistance because he dominated. Ford scores low on both because he was cornered. Nixon and Reagan score modestly on volume but high on Historical Weight because the overrides against them, the War Powers Resolution and the anti-apartheid sanctions, reshaped the country. McKinley scores high on resistance and reliance but low on weight because his silent pocket vetoes killed bills nobody remembers. The pen is one power exercised for many reasons, and the only honest way to rank it is to show all four numbers and let the reader see which trait each president actually possessed. The Senate publishes the counts. This report publishes what they mean.