How Many US Presidents Have There Been?

There is no single answer, and that is the interesting part. The official list says 47 presidencies as of June 2026 — but only 45 people have held the office, because the United States counts two men twice: Grover Cleveland and Donald Trump, the only presidents to serve non-consecutive terms.

Correct as of June 2026.

Why two men count twice

The American convention is to number presidencies, not people. When a president leaves office and later returns, the second stint gets a new number. Grover Cleveland did it first: elected in 1884 as the 22nd president, beaten by Benjamin Harrison in 1888 despite winning the popular vote, then re-elected in 1892 as the 24th. Every president since has carried a number one higher than his position in the line of actual people.

That off-by-one error sat quietly in the arithmetic for over a century — long enough to catch a president out. In his 2009 inaugural address, Barack Obama called himself "the 44th American to take the presidential oath." He was the 44th president, but only the 43rd person; Cleveland had already shifted the count. Then in 2024 Donald Trump repeated Cleveland's feat, winning back the office he lost in 2020 and becoming both the 45th and 47th president. The gap between presidencies and people is now two, and it will widen every time it happens again.

The full list, in order

All 47 presidencies from Washington to the present, with party and how each one ended. Filter to see, for example, just the four who were assassinated, or only the ones voters fired.

Eight died in office — four of them murdered

The deadliest stretch of the presidency ran from 1841 to 1963. William Henry Harrison (pneumonia, 1841, after 31 days), Zachary Taylor (digestive illness, 1850) and Warren Harding (heart failure, San Francisco, 1923) died of natural causes, as did Franklin Roosevelt, who suffered a cerebral hemorrhage at Warm Springs, Georgia on April 12, 1945, 82 days into his fourth term.

Four more were assassinated: Abraham Lincoln, shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865; James Garfield, shot by Charles Guiteau in July 1881 and dead 79 days later after just 199 days in office; William McKinley, shot by Leon Czolgosz at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in September 1901; and John F. Kennedy, shot in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Between 1841 and 1963, roughly one president in five did not leave office alive — a mortality rate that quietly drove the next story.

The nine accidental presidents

Every death or resignation promoted a vice president, and the first time it happened nobody was sure it was legal. The Constitution of 1787 was ambiguous about whether a VP became the president or merely an acting one. When Harrison died in 1841, John Tyler settled the question by force of personality: he took the oath, moved into the White House, and returned unopened any letter addressed to "Acting President Tyler." The Tyler Precedent held for 126 years on custom alone before the 25th Amendment finally wrote it into the Constitution in 1967.

Nine men reached the office this way: Tyler, Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Arthur, Theodore Roosevelt, Coolidge, Truman, Lyndon Johnson and Gerald Ford. Ford is the strangest case in the whole list — the only person ever to hold both the vice presidency and the presidency without winning a national election for either. He was appointed VP under the 25th Amendment when Spiro Agnew resigned in 1973, then inherited the presidency when Nixon resigned in August 1974.

Impeached: three men, four impeachments, zero removals

The House of Representatives has impeached a president four times, involving three men: Andrew Johnson in 1868 (the Senate fell one vote short of removing him), Bill Clinton in 1998, and Donald Trump in both 2019 and 2021 — the only president impeached twice. All four trials ended in acquittal; no president has ever been removed by conviction.

The name most people guess first does not belong on the list. Richard Nixon was never impeached. The House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment in July 1974, but Nixon resigned on August 9 before the full House could vote — making him the only president to resign, and keeping him, on a technicality, off the impeachment roll.

Ranked: what historians actually think

Since 2000, C-SPAN has periodically asked a large panel of historians to rank every former president on ten leadership qualities. In the most recent survey (2021, 142 historians), the podium was Abraham Lincoln first, George Washington second and Franklin D. Roosevelt third — the same top three as every edition before it. Theodore Roosevelt and Eisenhower rounded out the top five; Obama placed 10th. At the bottom sat James Buchanan, last of 44, for presiding over the slide into civil war, with Andrew Johnson and Franklin Pierce just above him.

The job those rankings judge has changed shape too. Washington was paid $25,000 a year in 1789; the salary has been $400,000 since 2001, set by Congress in 1999 — meaning, adjusted for inflation, the first president was paid considerably more than the current one.

Think you know the list? Prove it

Ten questions. The counting ones catch almost everybody.

America has had 45 presidents and 47 presidencies — and the entire gap between those two numbers is two stubborn men who refused to stay gone.