Tax Freedom Day Polling
Only 5% of Brits think their taxes are well spent, with a clear majority saying taxes are too high.
The Adam Smith Institute commissioned its partner organisation, Adam Smith Insights, to conduct a nationally representative poll of adults in Great Britain. The polling showed that only 5% of Brits believe that their taxes are well spent, with over half of Brits saying that taxes are too high. It also demonstrated that over half of Brits also think that their own tax burden has increased over the past few years, despite repeated pledges by politicians of all parties not to raise taxes.
With mounting public anger at the UK's high tax burden, politicians must urgently cut taxes. The Government should reconsider their hikes to Employer National Insurance contributions and focus instead on cutting spending, to enable reductions in the tax burden for ordinary Brits.
Polling methodology
The Adam Smith Institute commissioned a nationally representative poll of 1,066 Great Britain adults, conducted online between 6–8 June 2025. Sampling quotas were applied on age, gender, and region at the point of recruitment to approximate national distributions, and the final data were weighted to match the GB population profile across age, region, ethnicity, and 2024 general election vote using ONS 2021 Census data, age-by-vote distributions derived from Ipsos’s post-election analysis: “How Britain voted in the 2024 election”, and national vote share data from the Electoral Reform Society’s 2024 general election results.
The poll, with a median completion time of approximately 3 minutes, has a margin of error of ±3.7%. Respondents were filtered for completion quality (e.g., straight-lining, speeding), and responses with incomplete or invalid data were excluded from analysis. No imputation was applied.
For classification purposes, ‘homeowners’ were defined as respondents who reported either owning their home outright or owning it with a mortgage or loan.
The Adam Smith Institute is not currently a member of the British Polling Council, but we seek to comply with its standards of transparency and disclosure in the reporting of this survey. https://www.britishpollingcouncil.org/
For any further enquiries, please reach out to info@adamsmith.org.