# Corruption Perceptions Index The **Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI)** is [[Transparency International]]'s annual ranking of countries by perceived public-sector corruption, published since 1995. Since 2012 it has used a 0–100 scale — 0 highly corrupt, 100 very clean — built by aggregating expert assessments and business surveys from a set of independent source institutions. The 2012 methodology change is what made scores comparable across years; earlier scores are not. In the CPI 2025 release, the **United States scored 64 out of 100 and ranked 29th of 182 countries**, down one point from the prior year and its lowest showing on the index. Transparency International's Americas commentary singled out established democracies, the US among them, as experiencing declining performance. The index measures perception, not incidence, and only public-sector corruption. That scoping matters for how this vault reads it: the American channels the vault treats as central — [[Dark Money]], [[Lobbying]], [[Campaign Finance]], the [[Revolving Door]] — are legal, and a legal channel is not what expert surveys are asking about. The CPI is therefore best used here as a directional signal about institutional confidence rather than a measure of how much capture is actually occurring. A slow US decline on an instrument poorly designed to detect the American variant is arguably the more alarming reading. This is a stub — expand with the source-institution list, the year-by-year US series, and the methodological critique literature. ## See Also - [[Transparency International]] - [[Corruption]] - [[State Capture]] - [[Kleptocracy]]