The United States presents a deeply contradictory picture. Federal same-sex marriage protection was codified in 2022, but over 500 anti-LGBTQ+ bills were introduced in state legislatures in 2023 alone.

The EIU classifies the US as a 'flawed democracy'. Gerrymandering, campaign finance issues, and the January 6th 2021 Capitol attack represent serious concerns.

The 2022 Dobbs decision removed the federal constitutional right to abortion. Abortion is now effectively banned in 14+ states. This directly affects women travellers facing medical emergencies.

The US legal system has strong foundations but faces challenges. The Supreme Court has become overtly politicised. The US has the world's highest incarceration rate.

Not every country is measured on every value. Where the public data doesn't exist, we'd rather tell you than fill the gap with a guess — and United States is one of those cases.

The figure on our other country pages comes from the US Department of Labor's yearly review of what governments are doing about the worst forms of child labour, and that review covers the 131 countries which hold trade preferences with the United States. United States is not one of them, so it is never assessed. The obvious alternative doesn't help either: the ILO and UNICEF's global estimates, published in June 2025, are built on household surveys in 107 countries and leave out Europe and Northern America entirely — in their own words, "because of data limitations".

That absence is not the same as zero. The ILO's regional estimate puts around 2.3 million children aged 5 to 17 in child labour across Europe and Northern America, against under 1 per cent of children in high-income countries as a group. No national figure is published inside that. So the honest summary is that the record here is probably good and definitely unmeasured.