In most companies and most policy shops, the macro data and the public mood are tracked in separate rooms. One desk follows the unemployment release, the CPI figure, the GDP revision. Another follows approval ratings, consumer sentiment, Pew's long trust-in-government series. Both move decisions, and the two rarely land on the same page in the same week.
The U.S. Sentiment Signal puts them on one page. It is a monthly composite, scored 0 to 100, built from ten indicators of national well-being drawn from official federal sources and the better-known national surveys. We update it once a month and publish the headline score, the three category scores beneath it, and every underlying series.
We built it on an argument about accountability. A government should be judged the way any large organization is: by the results it produces and how those results hold up against its own record over time. That judgment has to be holistic. No single data release, approval poll, or survey settles the question, so the composite takes ten of them together, every month, on one scale and against twenty years of history. The aim is to judge performance by outcomes, not promises.
We are not trying to replace any of the individual numbers. The unemployment rate is still the unemployment rate; presidential approval still tells you what it always has. What the composite does is put those numbers on the same clock and the same scale, so a shift in mood and a shift in the macro can sit side by side without the usual mental conversion.
What it measures
The ten indicators sit inside three categories.
Economic Health draws on three monthly BLS series (the unemployment rate, the Consumer Price Index, and the average duration of unemployment) plus the University of Michigan Survey of Consumers and the Conference Board's Consumer Confidence index. The hard numbers say what is happening; the surveys say how households feel about it.
Government Trust is built on three long-running survey series: Gallup's presidential approval, Gallup's congressional approval, and Pew Research's trust-in-federal-government question, asked in roughly the same form since the late 1950s.
Social Confidence covers how people feel about their own situation and the country's direction. It uses Gallup's Economic Confidence Index and Gallup's monthly satisfaction-with-the-country series — both long-running, with enough history to place any current value in context.
The five Economic Health series come in through the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) API. The five polling series do not live on FRED and are pulled from their publishers: Pew's trust-in-government series scrapes cleanly and gives us full history, while the four Gallup series are best-effort scraped from each month's release, with a manual fallback when a scrape breaks. Every observation keeps its provenance attached, and each indicator's chart marks every point as measured (FRED, publisher, or manual entry) or as a modeled baseline.
How to use it
Each indicator is normalized onto a 0-to-100 scale, where 100 is the most optimistic or healthiest value that series has ever produced. The category scores aggregate up from their indicators, and the headline composite aggregates up from the three categories.
A single 0-to-100 number is not a forecast, and it is not a substitute for the underlying series. Where it earns its keep is in comparison: this month against last, this quarter against the same quarter a year ago, this expansion against the one before. The Analysis view lays the composite over twenty years of macro data, including real GDP, so you can watch how mood has tracked output through the 2008 financial crisis, the 2011 debt-ceiling standoff, the pre-pandemic high of 2019, the COVID shock, and the slower, inflation-driven erosion that followed.
Any composite has one obvious problem: aggregation hides what is moving inside it. A flat headline can sit on top of a sharp drop in trust offset by a quiet improvement in employment. The underlying series are always one click away for that reason.
The argument we are prepared to defend is narrow. Mood and macro are usually watched by different people in different meetings, and putting them on the same page tends to change the next question asked. A CEO looking at a falling sentiment composite over a steady jobs number asks something different than one who has seen only the jobs number.
Where things stand (May 2026)
The latest reading puts the composite at 27 out of 100 — the lowest value in the twenty years of history we carry. Beneath it: no indicator on track, four at risk, six off track, with the three categories scoring 40 (Economic Health, yellow), 10 (Government Trust, red), and 22 (Social Confidence, red). It is coherent across all three, not driven by one outlier.
- Economic Health. University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment sits at 53.3 (March, the latest month the survey has published) and Conference Board Consumer Confidence is in the low 90s, both well below their long-run thresholds. The labor market is mixed rather than reassuring: the unemployment rate is 4.3% (April) and the average duration of unemployment is 24.4 weeks. CPI sits at 332.4 (April, 1982–84 = 100), high enough that the cumulative price level keeps straining household budgets.
- Government Trust. Presidential approval is at 34% and congressional approval at 10% (both April readings, the latest published). Pew's trust-in-federal-government series most recently registered 17% in January 2025, close to the lowest values in its nearly seven-decade history.
- Social Confidence. Gallup's Economic Confidence Index is at −38 (April), a clearly negative consensus on the economy's direction. Gallup's satisfaction-with-the-country reading was 34% in February, the most recent month Gallup has published.
The composite now sits beneath every prior trough on file, including the 44 it recorded during the 2008 financial crisis, the 37 it touched in the 2011 debt-ceiling standoff, and the 52 it held during the COVID shock of April 2020. Each of those earlier rebounds was preceded by a clear inflection in either the labor market or trust before the composite turned. As of this month, neither has shown one. The Analysis view lays out the full twenty-year trajectory, and the indicator pages show each underlying series with its provenance.
Who it is for
We built this for anyone whose job depends on judging the country well. That includes executives setting near-term posture on hiring, pricing, and capital. It includes government-affairs and policy teams gauging where the political weather is heading, communications and brand leads working out what tone the next quarter calls for, reporters who want a single number that captures more than the latest unemployment release, and researchers and students who want a clean way into a wide set of public series.
None of it requires a background in economics. The composite, the category scores, and the underlying indicators are each meant to be grasped at a glance. For anyone who wants to go further, the methodology is written up in plain language.
The U.S. Sentiment Signal updates every month as new data lands and is free to use. If there is a source we should include, or a use we have not thought of, get in touch.