Presidents Ranked by Economic Record, Truman to Biden

One ruler for fourteen presidencies

This report asks a narrow question. What did the official numbers do while each president held office? Four agencies keep the books. The Bureau of Economic Analysis measures real GDP. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts payroll jobs and prices. The Census Bureau tracks median household income. None of these series care who is president. That is exactly why they are useful.

The postwar average for annual real GDP growth since 1946 is about 2.9 percent (BEA). Only five completed presidencies beat it clearly: Johnson at 5.3 percent, Kennedy at 4.3, Clinton at 3.9, Reagan and Biden near 3.5 (BEA annual data). Everyone since 2001 except Biden landed below it. That is the single most important fact in this dataset, and it belongs to both parties.

The jobs ledger

Payroll counts are the cleanest number in politics because BLS surveys roughly 120,000 businesses every month and revises against unemployment insurance records. Clinton presided over 22.9 million added jobs, the most of any presidency (BLS CES). Biden's roughly 16.7 million is the most in a single term, at an average near 485,000 per month early in the term as the economy refilled pandemic losses. Reagan added 16.1 million across eight years.

The bottom of the jobs table surprises people. George W. Bush's eight years produced about 1.4 million net jobs, roughly 14,000 per month, because the 2001 recession, a jobless recovery, and the 2008 collapse bracketed the term (BLS CES). Donald Trump's first term is the only completed postwar presidency that ended with fewer jobs than it began, down about 2.7 million, entirely because of the 2020 pandemic. Before March 2020 the term had added 6.7 million. The framework counts the full term for every president, including the ones hit by shocks they did not create. Truman got no exemption for demobilization. Obama got none for inheriting a financial crisis. Trump gets none for the pandemic.

Inflation is a tax the table counts

Average annual CPI inflation separates presidencies that felt prosperous from presidencies that did not. Carter's average of 9.9 percent is the worst of the modern era, with a peak of 14.6 percent in March and April 1980 (BLS CPI). Ford averaged about 8.1 percent. Nixon about 6. At the other end, Eisenhower and Obama each averaged near 1.4 percent, and Trump's first term averaged about 1.9 percent, among the lowest on record.

Biden's presidency is the clearest recent case of inflation dragging down an otherwise strong ledger. Growth averaged roughly 3.5 percent and job creation set a single-term record, yet CPI inflation averaged near 5 percent, the highest since Carter, and Census data show real median household income in 2024 was $83,730, statistically unchanged from the pre-pandemic 2019 level (Census Bureau, Income in the United States: 2024). Strong output plus flat real household income is why the same economy generated both good statistics and bad polling. The table records the statistics.

The surprises the data forces

Three results in this ranking will surprise readers. First, Jimmy Carter ranks in the middle, not the bottom. His economy added 10.3 million jobs in four years, a faster percentage pace than Reagan's, and grew 3.3 percent per year (BLS; BEA). Inflation alone pushed him down. Second, Ronald Reagan ranks fourth, not first. His growth and jobs record was strong but not the best; Johnson, Kennedy, and Clinton all posted better growth, and Clinton created more jobs in the same number of years. Third, George W. Bush ranks last. On every one of the four measures, growth, jobs, income, and even inflation relative to peers with similar growth, his eight years underperformed, and the term ended in the worst downturn since the Depression.

If that ordering produces discomfort, the discomfort belongs to the reader, not the data. The framework pays no attention to which party a president belonged to.

What this ranking does not measure

The second Trump term is excluded because it is incomplete as of July 2026; partial-term data is reported by BEA and BLS but a two-year record cannot be fairly ranked against completed terms. The ranking also does not model the lag between policy and outcome, the actions of the Federal Reserve, which controlled the disinflation credited to the Reagan years and the inflation fight of the Biden years, or global shocks like OPEC, the 2008 crisis, and the pandemic. Those forces are real. They are also unmeasurable at the level of a single ranking, so this table scores outcomes and states its limits plainly.