(C) Transparency International
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CPI 2025: Findings and insights - News [1]

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Date: 2026-02 

The global order is under strain from rivalry between major powers, and dangerous disregard for international norms. Armed conflicts and the climate crisis are having a deadly impact. Societies are also becoming more polarised. To meet these challenges, the world needs principled leaders and strong, independent institutions that act with integrity to protect the public interest. Yet, too often, we are seeing a failure of good governance and accountable leadership.

In many places, leaders point to security, economic or geopolitical issues as reasons to centralise power, sideline checks and balances and roll back commitments to internationally agreed standards – including anti-corruption measures. Too often, they treat transparency, independent scrutiny and accountability to the public as optional.

Transparency International’s 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) measures perceived levels of public-sector corruption in 182 countries and territories, drawing on 13 independent data sources and using a scale from 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean). This year, the global CPI average has dropped for the first time in more than a decade to just 42 out of 100. The vast majority of countries are failing to keep corruption under control: 122 out of 182 score under 50 in the index.

At the same time, the number of countries scoring above 80 has shrunk from 12 a decade ago to just five this year. In particular, there is a worrying trend of democracies seeing worsening perceived corruption – from the United States (64), Canada (75) and New Zealand (81), to various parts of Europe, like the United Kingdom (70), France (66) and Sweden (80).

Our research shows that corruption is not inevitable. Countries with long-term improvements in CPI scores have largely seen sustained effort from political leaders and regulators to implement broad legal and institutional reforms. Persistently low or declining CPI scores usually go hand in hand with limited or eroding democratic checks and balances, the politicisation of justice systems, undue influence over political processes, and a failure to safeguard civic space.

It is not a surprise that countries with full democracies tend to score highly on the CPI, while non-democratic regimes largely perform the worst. In most of the world’s full autocracies, such as Venezuela (10) and Azerbaijan (30), corruption is systemic and manifests at every level.

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[1] Url: https://www.transparency.org/en/news/cpi-2025-findings-insights-corruption

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