Donald Trump‘s address to Congress reached an average of 36.6 million viewers on Monday.
That total puts the speech 13% above Joe Biden’s most recent State of the Union address, which reached 32.2 million viewers in 2024. Still, Trump didn’t manage to draw as large an audience as he did with any of his State of the Union addresses during his first term as president. His 2017 address reached 47.7 million viewers, followed by 45.6 million in 2018, 46.8 in 2019 and 37.2 million in 2020.
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Measured by Nielsen, this year’s total accounts for viewers across ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, Merit Street, Telemundo, Univision, PBS, CNN, CNNe, FOX Business, FOX News Channel, MSNBC, NewsMax and NewsNation. Biden’s 2024 total includes all of the same networks minus Merit Street, which is unlikely to have caused a large enough discrepancy to affect which telecast drew more viewers. Biden’s most-watched State of the Union was in 2022, when he drew 38.2 million viewers; his first address in 2021 hit 26.9 million and in 2023 he reached 27.3 million.
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Older viewers made up a significant majority of Trump’s audience. Nielsen notes that 70.7% of viewers were aged 55 or older, with 20.5% being 35-54 and 5.7% being 18-34. Additionally, viewership peaked from 9:45 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET, rising above the 36.6 million average to reach 37.9 million viewers.
While Nielsen provided an aggregate total of viewership for the night, Fox News reports that its coverage of the address came ahead of all other broadcasters and cablers, averaging 10.7 million viewers and making up near 30% of the overall audience.
