---
title: "U.S. Has Executed 1,686 People Since 1976, and Texas Accounts for Over a Third"
description: "Texas leads with 604 executions, while support for capital punishment has fallen to its lowest point since 1972."
author: "rews desk"
published: 2026-09-30T18:51:51Z
modified: 2026-09-30T23:53:14Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/u-s-has-executed-1-686-people-since-1976-and-texas-accounts--b9520a
language: en
tags: ["death-penalty", "politics", "law", "crime", "trump", "us"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# U.S. Has Executed 1,686 People Since 1976, and Texas Accounts for Over a Third

*Texas leads with 604 executions, while support for capital punishment has fallen to its lowest point since 1972.*

By rews desk · September 30, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/u-s-has-executed-1-686-people-since-1976-and-texas-accounts--b9520a

## In brief

- The U.S. has executed 1,686 people since 1976; Texas accounts for 604 of them
- 27 states allow the death penalty, but only 21 can carry out executions; 23 states and D.C. have abolished it
- 58 executions took place in 2025 and 41 in the first nine months of 2026; Florida leads this year with 15
- Gallup put support at 52% in 2025, the lowest since 1972, down from 80% in 1994
- The Death Penalty Information Center estimates $700,000 to $1 million per execution, about $150 million a year

The United States has executed 1,686 people since the Supreme Court restored capital punishment in 1976, and more than a third of them — 604 — were put to death in a single state, Texas, according to data updated on Sept. 23.

The country is split nearly in half. Twenty-seven states still allow the death penalty, though only 21 can actually carry it out, because moratoriums stop executions in California, Pennsylvania, Oregon and three others. Twenty-three states and Washington, D.C., have abolished it, seven of them in the decade from 2011 to 2021: Illinois, Maryland, Delaware, Washington, New Hampshire, Colorado and Virginia.

The pace has picked up again. There were 58 executions in 2025 and 41 more in the first nine months of 2026. Florida leads this year’s count with 15, and it ranks second over the half-century with 140. This week brought another reprieve: an appeals court [stayed the execution of Tennessee’s only woman on death row](https://rews.cc/a/appeals-court-stays-execution-of-tennessee-s-only-woman-on-d-286785) hours before a lethal injection, and the state asked the Supreme Court to lift the stay.

The federal government has its own death penalty. The Justice Department under William P. Barr announced in 2019 that executions would resume, and on July 14, 2020, Daniel Lewis Lee became the first federal prisoner executed since 2003. Thirteen federal executions followed, all in President Trump’s first term, ending with Dustin Higgs on Jan. 16, 2021. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland then declared a moratorium, and on Dec. 23, 2024, President Biden commuted 37 of the 40 federal death sentences to life without parole. On his first day back in office, Jan. 20, 2025, Mr. Trump signed an executive order reversing course, and Attorney General Pam Bondi lifted the moratorium that Feb. 5, instructing the department to seek the death penalty whenever reasonable.

Every prisoner now on death row, and everyone executed in the modern era, was convicted of homicide. Each state sets its own list of qualifying circumstances; roughly half of the states that have the penalty count the murder of a child as an aggravating factor. For decades the punishment was also used for rape, most often against Black defendants whose accusers were white. The 2008 ruling in *Kennedy v. Louisiana* barred execution for any crime against a person in which no one died, leaving open, still unresolved, whether crimes against the state such as treason or espionage could qualify.

Behind Texas and Florida in the figures compiled by Rick Halperin of Southern Methodist University come Oklahoma, with 132 executions since 1976, then Virginia with 113, Missouri with 102, Alabama with 85 and Georgia with 77. Ohio has put 56 people to death and South Carolina 50. California has executed 13. Oregon has executed two, and Colorado, Connecticut, New Mexico and Wyoming one each. The federal government’s 16 put it level with Delaware.

Public support keeps eroding. A Gallup poll taken in October 2025 put approval at 52 percent, the lowest since 1972 and down from 80 percent in 1994; opposition is at its highest in nearly six decades. The falloff runs through the young: 41 percent of adults ages 18 to 34 support the death penalty and 46 percent of those 35 to 54 do, compared with 62 percent of those over 55. The partisan gap is 49 points. Eighty-one percent of Republicans favor it, nearly the 80 percent recorded in 2000, while support among Democrats has dropped from 56 percent to 32.

Cost is the other argument. The Death Penalty Information Center puts the figure at $700,000 to $1 million per execution, roughly $150 million a year nationwide, largely because of long appeals. Dr. Jon B. Gould, a professor of criminology at the University of California, Irvine, told El País that nothing about it adds up: “Whichever way you look at it, the math doesn’t work, because much more money ends up being invested in maintaining the entire capital punishment system, for only a handful of people to be executed each year.”