information report examples year 8

How to Write an Excellent Information Report

WRITING A HIGH-QUALITY INFORMATION REPORT

It is no surprise that informational texts are given a position of primary importance in most English curricula – we are in the information age, after all. From the ELA Standards of U.S. Common Core to the Literacy Requirements of the National Curriculum for England, non-fiction genres, in general, are given central positions in our teaching schedules. Acquiring the broad range of skills necessary to produce these texts competently takes time. Let’s look at the main features and organizational aspects of information reports to help set our students on the path to writing success.

Regardless of what genre we aim to teach our students, they must develop an awareness of the different approaches required when writing for various purposes. Students need to be able to select the correct tools and structures for the job, and this starts with the students defining the text’s purpose.

Information reports present factual information to inform the reader about a specific topic. Examples of information reports may be found in encyclopedias, reference books, technical texts, social studies books, science books, magazines, and even internet websites. These may all be classed as forms of information texts. Despite this very broad range, it is useful to describe information reports in relation to several standard features, which are explained below.

WHAT IS AN INFORMATION REPORT?

An information report provides readers with information on a chosen topic by providing them with facts.

INFORMATION REPORTS are also commonly known as INFORMATIONAL TEXTS and INFORMATIVE WRITING.

Generally, an information report is written to provide facts about a living or non-living object.  It can be an individual object or a group of objects.  Some suggestions are.

• Sea Creatures
• The Bald Eagle
• The Titanic

The challenge in writing a good information report is to provide the audience with plenty of facts and evidence about a topic without providing a personal opinion.  If you do include personal opinion, essentially, you are writing a persuasive ( also known as an expository ) text.  If you are writing about a class of objects, such as sharks, it is important to highlight the differences and similarities between the objects.

A COMPLETE TEACHING UNIT ON WRITING INFORMATION REPORTS

Get an entire unit on INFORMATIONAL TEXTS with no prep required. The editable DIGITAL & PRINT bundle offers a proven model based on research skills, writing strategies, and engaging content with 96 PAGES of material.

TYPES OF INFORMATION REPORTS

You will frequently encounter informational texts in your reading for both work and pleasure and whilst there are many variations, they generally fall into these three main categories.

Scientific Reports:  Usually focuses on describing of appearance and behaviour of the subject of your report.

Technological Reports :  Usually focus on two main categories of information. Those are the components and uses of the technology.

Social Studies Reports:  Usually focuses on the description of people, places, history, geography, society, culture and economy.

STRUCTURE AND FEATURES OF AN INFORMATION REPORT

Information report structure.

INTRODUCTION Classify your topic, and describe the aspects, features or characteristics of the subject.

PARAGRAPHS Will be used to organise your information report. Use paragraphs to elaborate on your subject.

IMAGES Labelled diagrams such as maps, diagrams and pictures support and extend your written information.

SUBHEADINGS Keep your report in a logical state and ordered. It also helps the reader find key information quickly.

INFORMATION REPORT FEATURES

SPECIALIZED VOCABULARY Allows for more information to be shared with minimal text.

THIRD PERSON PERSPECTIVE Relays information from an impersonal position devoid of strong emotive language.

COMPARATIVE LANGUAGE Such as compared to, smaller than, greatest, different form is used to provide context

DEFINITIONS Of uncommon or unfamiliar language may be required in parts to assist the reader

RESEARCHING YOUR INFORMATION REPORT

Teaching students how to write information reports offers an excellent opportunity to introduce research skills to your students. For more advanced students, it creates opportunities for them to hone these important skills further. There are also several different processes students need to develop to ensure that they can filter their research for relevancy and accuracy. Let’s take a look at these:

1. Define the Scope of the Topic

If the scope of the topic is not defined precisely, considerable energy can be wasted at the research stage – especially if internet research is undertaken! Undoubtedly, you will know this from your own experience. How many man and woman hours have been wasted as our own research takes us down a pesky internet cul-de-sac?

2. Uncover Important Keywords and Phrases

The importance of keywords and subject-specific vocabulary in writing an information report has already been mentioned. However, generating these keywords and phrases is also crucial for the research stage when using the internet. Search engines are only as valuable as the terms that are searched. The research process will help students refine and filter the concepts and vocabulary they will use in writing their text.

3 Evaluate Sources

After selecting their search terms, students must look at and evaluate the returned sources. This is best achieved by the teacher reviewing various examples and modelling the criteria used to select the most valuable. Students are often not required to cite research papers at the school level, etc. But they should begin the process of ranking information in terms of its legitimacy. This is a long-term objective, but the teaching of this genre of writing offers ample opportunities for introducing this complex idea. Teaching this objective may involve lessons on things like distinguishing fact from opinion, how to spot bias, detecting fake news/satire, cross-referencing sources etc.

4 Develop Note-Taking Skills

The research stage of writing an information report affords students a valuable opportunity to develop their note-taking skills. The ability to mine information for the key points is an essential skill for a student to develop. Obviously, note-taking is a complex skill and will necessarily be differentiated according to the student’s age and abilities.

As an information report is a factual piece of writing focused on attention to detail, you must ensure your students are provided with an opportunity to research their topic.  Ensure they use technical language when required and have a collection of useful facts to include.  

The research will be a significant part of your lesson time, so please ensure you allow this before expecting them to contribute anything worthwhile.

Although we strongly encourage using visuals, leave this until all writing has been drafted, written and edited .  It should support a robust written report first and foremost. Using grap hic organizers, planning tools, and writing checklists will greatly assist the planning and editing time. We have an in-depth article on student research strategies to explore here.

HOW TO WRITE AN INFORMATION REPORT

When considering how to organize the structure of an information report, the purpose of the text must be at the forefront of the student’s decision-making. The complexity of the textual organization will again depend on the student’s grade level and ability; however, the general structure will be as follows:

1. Table of Contents

A table of contents should be included for longer information texts. It should outline where specific information can be found in the document or the text. For longer texts, each section should correspond to a page number on the table of contents. For shorter texts, this may be numbered sections instead of page numbers. This will allow the reader to locate specific information that is being searched for without having to read through the whole text. Page numbers can be entered on the table of contents after the text is completed.

2. Introduction

As with other writing genres, information texts must first use a hook to grab the reader’s attention. This hook may take the form of an interesting fact or statistic, an anecdote or a question etc. Fundamentally, the introduction to the text must orientate the reader to the topic in question. It should outline what the reader can expect to learn within the body of the text.

3. Subheadings

The main job of the student when writing an informational text is to organize the information so that the reader can easily understand it. To help the reader achieve this, they need to organize their ideas into paragraphs and to help the reader locate the information on each of these ideas; each paragraph should contain a subheading. These subheadings can also provide titles for the table of contents.

Check out our complete guide to writing perfect paragraphs and sentence structure.

Subheadings are necessary to help your students organize their information by focusing on various aspects of the topic as a whole. For example, if the focus of the information report is an animal, then subsequent subheadings may be something along the lines of appearance , habitat , diet etc. Each subheading will consist of at least one paragraph that constitutes a separate section in the body of the text.

These subheadings often emerge organically as the student undertakes their research before writing. Subheadings may also be accompanied by relevant drawings, maps, tables etc., that summarize the information contained within.

The first sentence of each section should begin with a topic sentence expressing that paragraph’s main idea or topic. The following sentence will provide more detail on the topic sentence or main idea. The next sentence can provide an example or evidence regarding the main idea. Have your students practice this paragraph structure: Topic – Detail – Example.

4. Conclusion

The closing section of an information report can be used to summarize. The conclusion should focus on what the reader has learned in the text. It may also contain information on links or further reading the reader can undertake to find out more about the topic. For more advanced students, the opportunity to make cross-curricular links to IT skills (for example) can be taken by encouraging students to incorporate hyperlinks to further sources.

5. Glossary

The glossary will contain much of the subject-specific vocabulary identified at the prewriting stage. It will contain the words alphabetically and a definition that gives the word context in light of the topic. Some of the contents of the glossary will also be identified by the student reading over the body of the text they have written and selecting words that may pose difficulties for readers or need further contextualizing in terms of the topic. Sometimes, it is helpful to use bold fonts to emphasize the words in a text that will be defined in the glossary. This allows the reader to know they can turn to the glossary to find out further information on the definition of this word and its use in context. As with the other sections of an information report, illustrations, tables, and photographs can be used here to visually represent related ideas and concepts and reinforce the definitions provided.

And there it is, some meat on the bones of information reports. Choosing topics for your students to write about can be generated either by the interests of students themselves, which can significantly enthuse them, or you can select topics for your students that tie into other areas of their learning, thereby killing the proverbial two birds with one stone! It is quite a complex genre but a very important one, and it is advised that students are offered ample opportunity to read lots of information reports to internalize these features and structures. The reading of information reports not only helps our students to understand how to write them but also, wonderfully, helps our students learn lots of stuff about lots of things!

LANGUAGE FEATURES OF INFORMATION REPORTS

Present tense:.

Information reports are predominantly written in the present tense. This is because the information presented on the topic will generally be considered static knowledge. However, this is not always the case for all information texts; for example, autobiographies and biographies can be considered information texts but will more than likely be written in the past tense. For the purposes of this article, however, we will focus on the more formal genres of information texts.

Subject-Specific Vocabulary:

Depending on the topic of the text, vocabulary specific to the subject will typically be used. For example, if the text provides information on an animal, it will likely utilize related words and phrases such as ‘habitat’, ‘species’, ‘offspring’, ‘lifespan’ etc. A helpful exercise for preparation to write an information report is to have students brainstorm words and phrases related to that topic. This also helps ensure the student covers all relevant related material and helps them organize their material before writing. It will also provide useful search terms for internet researching of the topic and some of the vocabulary to be contained in the glossary – more on this later!

General Nouns:

Students need to realize that they should use general nouns when writing on their topic. The information in their text should be generally accurate, and this should be reflected in the generic noun classifying it; for example, Bees collect nectar from flowers.

Passive Voice:

Information reports are an example of formal non-fiction writing. In common with lots of formal writing, they often apply the passive voice. It is helpful to draw the student’s attention to how this differs from other more personal writing genres, such as fiction. When teaching narrative writing , we often encourage, even insist, our students name the doer of the action. In fiction writing, using the passive voice often takes the narrative drive out of a story, leaving it limp and weak in the hands of the reader. This is because the character and narrative voice are central to story writing . This is not the case in information report writing. Here, the passive voice draws attention away from the doer or speaker and firmly brings attention to the object.

For example:

“Every year, cars kill thousands of hedgehogs on our roads.”

Here the active voice is used. Read carefully; we can note a considerable amount of our attention goes to the ‘killer’ in this sentence, i.e. ‘cars’. This brings our attention away from what should be our primary focus and the topic of the report, ‘hedgehogs’.

If we instead use the passive voice to convey this information, it would look something like this:

“Every year, thousands of hedgehogs are killed on our roads.”

Now the same information is relayed to the reader while maintaining the sentence’s focus on the subject ‘hedgehogs’.

A valuable exercise to help students understand the difference between passive and active voices is to give them a list of sentences for them to identify whether the active or passive voice is being used. They can then rewrite active voice sentences as passive voice sentences and vice versa.

Information reports are also generally written in the third person for the same reason the passive voice is used. The third-person perspective creates an impersonal tone that maintains a formal tone appropriate to the genre.

Visual Information:

Visual presentations of the information to support the text, whether in the form of diagrams, photographs, graphs, maps, pictures, or tables, are extremely helpful to the reader. They help the reader to digest large amounts of information quickly. Remember too that pictures, photographs etc., should be labelled with captions explaining what they show.

Visual presentations should reinforce points made in the text, often in a condensed way. You may remember flicking through the pages of the World Book Encyclopedia or Encyclopedia Britannica as a child, and even if lacking the necessary literacy skills to actually read the articles, you likely picked up information just by looking at the colourful and well-presented illustrations and tables.

Browse any well-developed website, and the central role visual media plays in information sharing will quickly become apparent. Your student’s work should be no different in this regard. Depending on the age and ability of your students, they may wish to draw pictures or create graphs using computer software to accompany their text.

Fact vs Opinion:

As stated, the purpose of information reports is to present factual information on a topic. It is essential that students can consistently and accurately differentiate between what constitutes fact and what can be considered opinion. This is not always as straightforward as it may seem and will require some practice on the part of the student.

It can be helpful for students to have several sessions working on distinguishing fact from opinion before writing their information reports. Prepare a set of statements for the students in your class. It may be on the topic on which they are to write their reports or on an entirely unrelated topic. There should be a mixture of factual and opinion-based statements. After instructing the students on the differences between facts and opinions , have them go through each statement in their groups and discuss which they believe to be facts and which they believe to be opinions. They then categorize them accordingly.

Beyond the writing of information reports, identifying opinions and facts is an invaluable skill to inculcate in our students. You may wish to encourage them to apply it when watching TV news, reading newspapers etc.

TIPS FOR WRITING A GREAT INFORMATION REPORT

• Assume your readers are not as knowledgeable on the topic as you are. This means you must briefly explain your topic before getting into the body.
• Use the correct scientific and technical terms in your report.
• Find or create some labelled diagrams if possible.
• Use paragraphs effectively. Each new element of your information report should start with a new paragraph.
• Information reports are always written in the present tense and from a third-person perspective.
• You may ask questions or comment around your findings in the conclusion only. The rest of your report should be constructed purely of facts and evidence.

Be Technical and Descriptive

When putting together an information report, you need to know your topic well, so be sure to do your research beforehand.  If you were writing an information report on the Titanic, you might want to discover some of the following facts.

• When & Where was Titanic built?
• What materials was it made from?
• Who was the captain, and were any other significant people involved?
• Explain the facts about Titanic’s maiden voyage, such as locations and dates.
• What caused the Titanic to sink ( Remember not to share opinions, just facts.)
• Any critical dates and statistics associated with Titanic.

INFORMATION REPORT GRAPHIC ORGANIZER TEMPLATE

INFORMATION REPORT WRITING CHECKLIST

Information report example (student writing samples).

Below are a collection of information report examples for students.  Click on the image to enlarge and explore them in greater detail.  Please take a moment to read the information reports in detail and the teacher and student guides highlighting some critical elements of information report writing to consider before writing.

Please understand these student writing samples are not intended to be perfect examples for each age or grade level but a piece of writing for students and teachers to explore together to critically analyze to improve student writing skills and deepen their understanding of information report writing.

We recommend reading the example either a year above or below, as well as the grade you are currently working with, to gain a broader appreciation of this text type .

INFORMATION REPORT WRITING PROMPTS

Teaching Resources

Use our resources and tools to improve your student’s writing skills through proven teaching strategies.

We have several premium information report writing resources available that offer a complete, no-fuss and instant solution to producing excellent informative texts in the classroom and independently.

INFORMATION REPORT WRITING ANCHOR CHARTS & RUBRIC BUNDLE

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (92 Reviews)

OTHER INFORMATION REPORT WRITING ARTICLES

In order to continue enjoying our site, we ask that you confirm your identity as a human. Thank you very much for your cooperation.

Label the Text Structure: Information Report

Add to calendar, add to favourites, description.

Label an example structure of an information report with this set of worksheets that are differentiated for your class.

Students are given a visual block structure of an information report and the names of each section. They must use their knowledge of how an information report can be structured to label and describe each section that makes up the text.

There are three versions to help with differentiation in your classroom:

• Version 1: has a word bank for students to refer to when adding their labels.
• Version 2: no word bank, students need to use their knowledge of typical information report structure.
• Version 3: contains a word bank but asks students to draw the block structure themselves.

Print one page per student, or if working in small groups, place a few sheets into write-and-wipe sleeves and reuse them for each group of students.

Additional information

Related products

• Waste Management Sorting Bins
• Health Assessment Years 1 & 2: Protective Behaviours & Help Seeking Strategies
• Health Assessment Years 1 & 2: Health Messages
• Go Fish Oral Language Card Game
• Finish the Decodable CVC Sentence Worksheets
• Dog & Bone: 1-10

Australian Curriculum V9

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

Lorem ipsum/ Lorem ipsum/ Lorem ipsum

Email Address

Remember Me

Out of Credits

Looks like you’re out of credits.

Create an account

Reset password, item added to your cart.

0 items in the cart ( $ 0.00 )

MAKE LEARNING TO WRITE INFORMATION REPORTS EASIER

• _Post Layouts

ESL List of Irregular Verbs

Past tense role play cards esl adults, how to teach information report writing, alphabet games for adult esl learners super simple and fun, 5 irregular verbs anchor charts to guide you in teaching conjugation.

ESL learners struggle with many aspects of the English language, however when it comes to writing - they struggle the most with sentence and paragraph structure. Looking for a comprehensive guide on How to Teach Information Report Writing ? Teaching report writing can be daunting, however with the right materials and ideas, teachers can successfully help ESL learners master this task

How to Write an Information Report

Firstly, what is an information report.

An information report provides readers with information on chosen a topic by providing them with facts. These facts are then layed out in an informational manner.

Generally an information report is written to provide facts about a living or non-living object.  It can be an individual object or a group of objects.  Some suggestions are factual.

Information Report Format

The challenge in writing a good information report is to provide the audience with plenty of facts and evidence about a topic without providing personal opinion.  Personal opinions would make the report more of an opinion piece rather than an informational piece.

If you do include personal opinion essentially you are writing a persuasive ( also known as an expository ) text. 

How to Guide Students to Write their Informational Reports

Information report examples for year 4 or esl.

What's included:

► What is an information report? (activity & guide for class activities and discussion).

► The structure of an information report.

► Visual elements in an information report.

► Glossary / bibliography writing.

► Sample information report from the National Geographic web.

► Formal language used in reports. (passive voice, limited use of pronouns etc.)

► Report writing tips poster.

► Whole class / pair research activity with information provided.

► Brain storming sheet.

► KWL chart.

► Drafting a report.

► Editing your draft of the report.

► Checklist / pair checklist for editing.

► Information report assessment with rubric.

Post a Comment

Our website uses cookies to improve your experience. Learn more

Contact Form

Teach Starter, part of Tes Teach Starter, part of Tes

Search  everything  in all resources

Results for ‛Information Reports Examples’

684 teaching resources

• Foundation Year   79
• Preschool / Kindergarten   8
• Year 1   162
• Year 2   171
• Year 3   254
• Year 4   258
• Year 5   258
• Year 6   229
• Year 7   83
• Classroom Decor   161
• Worksheet   140
• Report Card Writing   19
• Teacher Planning   14
• Lesson Plan   11
• Teaching Slides   11
• Classroom Management   9
• Assessment Tools   3
• Unit Plan   1
• English   184
• Science   80
• Technology   30
• Social Emotional Learning   8
• The Arts   6
• Health and Physical Education   3
• Curriculum-Aligned   299
• Editable   73
• Differentiated   6
• Plus Plan   370
• Printable PDF   366
• Podcast   252
• Google Slides   123
• Microsoft Word   33
• Microsoft PowerPoint   26
• Google Sheets   14
• Microsoft Excel   14
• Zip File   12
• Resource Pack   4
• Preschool / Kindergarten 8
• Foundation Year 79
• Posters 147
• Classroom Displays 7
• Word Walls 4
• Book Review 20
• Writing Templates 15
• Task Cards 10
• Cut and Paste 8
• Fact Sheets 8
• Sorting Activities 7
• Inquiry Based Learning 6
• Mini Books 4
• Colour By Code 3
• Word Searches 3
• Brochures 1
• Report Card Writing 19
• Interactive Games 7
• Active games 3
• Board Games 3
• Teacher Planning 14
• Lesson Plan 11
• Teaching Slides 11
• Behaviour Management 6
• Classroom Procedures 3
• Assessment Tools 3
• Unit Plan 1
• Writing 130
• Earth and Space Sciences 33
• Biological Sciences 30
• Physical Sciences 11
• Chemical Sciences 3
• Science Inquiry 2
• Geography 23
• Economics 7
• Multiculturalism 7
• First Nations Peoples Histories and Cultures 1
• Fractions 3
• Geometry & Space 3
• Graphs and Data 3
• Whole Number Operations 3
• Measurement 1
• Number Sense 1
• Place Value 1
• Self Management 4
• Decision Making Skills 2
• Social Awareness 1
• Visual Arts 1
• Personal, Social & Community Health 2
• Physical Education 1
• Curriculum-Aligned 299
• Editable 73
• Differentiated 6
• Plus Plan 370
• Printable PDF 366
• Podcast 252
• Google Slides 123
• Microsoft Word 33
• Microsoft PowerPoint 26
• Google Sheets 14
• Microsoft Excel 14
• Zip File 12
• Resource Pack 4

5 Information Report Writing Prompts

Information Report Text Type Poster With Annotations

Let's Research! Information Report Templates

Musical Act Information Report Planner

Animal Information Report - Shared Writing

Animal Information Report - Modelled Writing

Build an Animal Fact File – Cut and Paste Worksheets

Exploring Informative Texts Unit Plan - Year 1 and Year 2

Fossicking for Fossils – Worksheet

Let's Get Ready to Rock! – Worksheet

The Discovery of Tutankhamen's Tomb – Worksheet

Extreme Environments: Lands of Ice and Sand – Worksheet

How Does Water Get to Our Taps? – Worksheet

The Wonders of the Human Body – Worksheet

Informative Texts - Text Structure

Mr D and the Doomed Zoo Visit

Imaginative, Persuasive and Informative Paragraphs Teaching Slides

Animal Adaptations - Informative Writing Prompt Worksheets

Animal Research Project - Informative Writing Booklet

Bowerbird Fact File and Research Project

Rainforest Bird Craft & Writing Template

Animals That Adapt - Research Project & Report

Informative Texts Writing Task - Weather

Informative Texts Writing Task - Firefighters

Schools Around the World – Brochure and Writing Template

Informative Texts Fact Sort - Halloween Writing Activity

NAPLAN-Style Assessment Rubric - Informative Writing

Spring-Themed Informative Writing Prompt (Plus Display)

Dia De Los Muertos Word Wall and Informative Writing Stimulus

Informative Text Writing Graphic Organiser Pack

Informative Text Structure Sorting Task - The Apple iPad

Informative Paragraphs Sequencing Activity

Informative Texts Writing Task - Cars

Informative Texts Writing Tasks - Fact Files and Scaffolding Sheet

Informative Texts Writing Task - Gemstones

'Facts About...' - Informative Texts Worksheet

Informative Texts Writing Task - Eagles

Informative Texts Writing Task - Elephants

Build-a-Bird - Owl Report Writing Template

Informative Texts Writing Scaffold

Simple Informative Texts - Writing Scaffold

Informative Paragraph Planning Template

Paragraphs in Informative Writing - Poster and Planning Template

Build-a-Quokka Report Writing Template

Build-a-Crab - Report Writing Template

Informative Writing Word Wall

Build-a-Bat Report Writing Template

Informative Writing Bump It Up Wall – Year 1

Informative Writing Bump It Up Wall – Year 4

Informative Writing Bump It Up Wall – Year 2

Informative Writing Bump It Up Wall – Year 3

Informative Writing Bump It Up Wall – Year 6

Exploring Informative Texts PowerPoint

Informative Writing - Fact Sorting Activity

Paragraph of the Week PowerPoint - Informative Paragraphs

Informative Paragraph Starters - Topic Sentence Cards

Developing Informative Writing Skills PowerPoint

Identifying Informative Language Worksheets

Writing Informative Texts PowerPoint

Informative Text Checklist - Structure, Language and Features

• Rating Count
• Price (Ascending)
• Price (Descending)
• Most Recent

Information report examples

Resource type.

Information report structure, example and templates

Information Report Example and Template - figurative language, show don't tells

Farm Goats Information Report Annotated Example

NEW AND IMPROVED Information Report Example

Information Report Examples - FREEBIE

Information Report Writing Sequencing Activity, Graphic Organisers, Rubric

Wanted Poster Templates: Character Wanted Poster: Wanted Poster Book Report

Informational Writing Power Pack | Information Report & Research Skills Units

Australian Animal Information Texts, Report Writing & Reading Analysis Bundle

Paper Bag Book Report Template: Paper Bag Vest Directions, Rubric & How To Photo

Wild Weather Reports

Tracking the Weather | Weather Forecasts and Reports

Fluency stuttering evaluation | Assessment report template | Speech therapy

{Free} Speech Therapy Progress Report Template {editable PowerPoint file}

Freedom of the Press Report - media studies

Writing an Animal Research Report Graphic Organizer, Example , and Template

How to Write a Book Report MiniLesson (4-6)

Crazy News Report - Information Writing

Animal Fact Note Taking Worksheets | Gather & Collate Animal Report Information

Writing Reports - How to - checklist - guides - parts of a report detailed

Reptile Animal Information Texts, Report Writing & Reading Analysis Work Bundle

Information Report MODELLED RESPONSE and Annotated BUMP IT UP WALL

Information report writing unit

Thorny Devil Information Texts, Report Paragraph Writing & Reading Analysis

• We're hiring
• Help & FAQ
• Privacy policy
• Student privacy
• Terms of service
• Tell us what you think

Full-Length SAT Suite Practice Tests

Find full-length practice tests on Bluebook™ as well as downloadable paper (nonadaptive) practice tests to help you prepare for the SAT, PSAT/NMSQT, PSAT 10, and PSAT 8/9.

FactChecking the Biden-Trump Debate

In the first debate clash of the 2024 campaign, the two candidates unleashed a flurry of false and misleading statements.

By Robert Farley , Eugene Kiely , D'Angelo Gore , Jessica McDonald , Lori Robertson , Catalina Jaramillo , Saranac Hale Spencer and Alan Jaffe

Posted on June 28, 2024

The much-anticipated first debate of 2024 between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump featured a relentless barrage of false and misleading statements from the two candidates on immigration, the economy, abortion, taxes and more.

• Both candidates erred on Social Security, with Biden incorrectly saying that Trump “wants to get rid” of the program, and Trump falsely alleging that Biden will “wipe out” Social Security due to the influx of people at the border.
• Trump misleadingly claimed that he was “the one that got the insulin down for the seniors,” not Biden. Costs were lowered for some under a limited project by the Trump administration. Biden signed a law capping costs for all seniors with Medicare drug coverage.
• Trump warned that Biden “wants to raise your taxes by four times,” but Biden has not proposed anything like that. Trump was also mostly wrong when he said Biden “wants the Trump tax cuts to expire.” Biden said he would extend them for anyone making under $400,000 a year.
• Biden repeated his misleading claim that billionaires pay an average federal tax rate of 8%. That White House calculation factors in earnings on unsold stock as income.
• Trump repeated his false claim that “everybody,” including all legal scholars, wanted to end Roe v. Wade’s constitutional right to abortion.
• Trump falsely claimed that “the only jobs” Biden “created are for illegal immigrants and bounced back jobs that bounced back from the COVID.” Total nonfarm employment is higher than it was before the pandemic, as is the employment level of native-born workers.
• Biden claimed that Trump oversaw the “largest deficit of any president,” while Trump countered that “we now have the largest deficit” under Biden. The largest budget deficit was under Trump in fiscal year 2020, but that was largely because of emergency spending due to COVID-19.
• Biden misleadingly said that “Black unemployment is the lowest level it has been in a long, long time.” The rate reached a record low in April 2023, and it was low under Trump, too, until the pandemic.
• Biden said Trump called U.S. veterans killed in World War I “suckers and losers,” which Trump called a “made up quote.” The Atlantic reported that, based on anonymous sources. A former Trump chief of staff later seemed to confirm Trump said it.
• Trump claimed that Biden “caused the inflation,” but economists say rising inflation was mostly due to disruptions to the economy caused by the pandemic.
• Trump grossly inflated the number of immigrants who have entered the country during the Biden administration — putting the number at 18 million to 20 million — and he said, without evidence, that many of them are from prisons and mental institutions.
• Trump claimed that “we had the safest border in history” in the “final months” of his presidency. But apprehensions of those trying to cross illegally in the last three full months of his presidency were about 50% higher than in the three months before he took office.
• Biden criticized Trump for presiding over a loss of jobs when he was president, but that loss occurred because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Trump falsely claimed that “some states” run by Democrats allow abortions “after birth.” If it happened, it would be homicide, and that’s illegal.
• Trump made the unsupported claim that the U.S. border with Mexico is “the most dangerous place in the world,” and suggested that it has opened the country to a violent crime wave. The data show a reduction in violent crime in the U.S.
• Trump overstated how much food prices have risen due to inflation. Prices are up by about 20%, not double or quadruple. 
• Trump boasted his administration “had the best environmental numbers ever.” Trump reversed nearly 100 environmental rules limiting pollution. Although greenhouse gas emissions did decline from 2019 to 2020, the EPA said that was due to the impacts of the pandemic on travel and the economy.   
• Biden said he joined the Paris Agreement because “if we reach the 1.5 degrees Celsius, and then … there’s no way back.” Limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees would reduce the damages and losses of global warming, but scientists agree that climate action is still possible after passing the threshold.
• Trump said immigrants crossing the border illegally were living in “luxury hotels.” New York City has provided hotel and motel rooms to migrant families, but there is no evidence that they are being placed in “luxury” hotels. 
• Trump falsely claimed that there was “no terrorism, at all” in the U.S. during his administration. There were several terrorist acts carried out by foreign-born individuals when he was president.
• While talking about international trade, Trump falsely claimed that the U.S. currently has “the largest deficit with China.” In 2023, the trade deficit in goods and services with China was the lowest it has been since 2009.
• Trump wrongly claimed that prior to the pandemic, he had created “the greatest economy in the history of our country.” That’s far from true using economists’ preferred measure — growth in gross domestic product.
• As he has many times before, Trump wrongly claimed, “I gave you the largest tax cut in history.” That’s not true either as a percentage of gross domestic product or in inflation-adjusted dollars.
• Trump contrasted his administration with Biden’s by misleadingly noting that when he left office, the U.S. was “energy independent.” The U.S. continues to export more energy than it imports.

The debate was hosted by CNN in Atlanta on June 27.

Social Security

Biden claimed that Trump “wants to get rid” of Social Security, even though the former president has consistently said he will not cut the program and has advised Republicans against doing so.

Earlier this year, Biden and his campaign based the claim on Trump saying in a  March 11 CNBC interview  that “there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements.” As  we’ve said , in context, instead of reducing benefits, Trump was talking about cutting waste and fraud in those programs — although there’s not enough of that to make the program solvent over the long term.

“I will never do anything that will jeopardize or hurt Social Security or Medicare,” Trump later said in a  March 13 Breitbart interview . “We’ll have to do it elsewhere. But we’re not going to do anything to hurt them.”

During the GOP presidential primary, Trump also  criticized  some of his Republican opponents for proposing to raise the retirement age for Social Security, which budget experts  have said  would reduce scheduled benefits for those affected.

Some critics of Trump have  argued  that he cannot be expected to keep his promise because of his past budget proposals. But,  as we’ve written , Trump did not propose cuts to Social Security retirement benefits.

Meanwhile, Trump claimed during the debate that Biden “is going to single handedly destroy Social Security” because of illegal immigration. “These millions and millions of people coming in, they’re trying to put them on Social Security. He will wipe out Social Security,” Trump said of Biden.

As  we  and  others  have explained before, immigrants who are not authorized to be in the U.S. aren’t eligible for Social Security. In fact, because many such individuals pay into Social Security via payroll taxes but cannot receive benefits, illegal immigrants bolster rather than drain the finances of the program.

In referring to what seniors pay for insulin, Trump misleadingly claimed, “I heard him say before ‘insulin.’ I’m the one that got the insulin down for the seniors. I took care of the seniors.” Insulin costs went down for some beneficiaries under a limited project under Trump; Biden signed a more expansive law affecting all seniors with Medicare drug coverage.

Under Trump, out-of-pocket costs were lowered to $35 for some Medicare Part D beneficiaries under a two-year pilot project in which some insurers could voluntarily reduce the cost for some insulin products. KFF, a nonpartisan health policy research organization,  explained  earlier this month that under this model, in effect from 2021 to 2023, “participating Medicare Part D prescription drug plans covered at least one of each dosage form and type of insulin product at no more than $35 per month,” and “less than half of all Part D plans chose to participate in each year.”

But in 2022, Biden  signed a law  that required all Medicare prescription drug plans to cap all insulin products at $35. The law also capped the out-of-pocket price for insulin that’s covered under Medicare Part B, which covers drugs administered in a health care provider’s office. The caps went into effect last year.

STAT, a news site that covers health care issues,  reported  that the idea for a $35 cap for seniors initially came from Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical company, which proposed it in 2019.

Trump on Biden Tax Plan

“He’s the only one I know he wants to raise your taxes by four times,” Trump said of Biden. “He wants to raise everybody’s taxes by four times. He wants the Trump tax cuts to expire. So everybody … [is] going to pay four to five times –  nobody ever heard of this before.”

Trump regularly warns of massive tax hikes for “everybody,” should Biden be reelected. That doesn’t jibe with anything Biden has proposed.

In his more than three years as president, Biden’s  major tax changes  have included setting a  minimum corporate tax rate  of 15% and lowering taxes for some families by  expanding the child tax credit  and, for a time, making it fully refundable, meaning families could still receive a refund even if they no longer owe additional taxes.

As  we wrote  in 2020, when Trump made a similar claim, Biden proposed during that campaign to raise an additional $4 trillion in taxes over the next decade, although the increases would have fallen mainly on very high-income earners and corporations. The plan would not have doubled or tripled people’s taxes at any income level (on average), according to analyses of Biden’s plan by the  Penn Wharton Budget Model ,  the Tax Policy Center  and  the Tax Foundation .

In March 2023, the TPC’s Howard Gleckman  wrote  that Biden proposed a 2024 budget that would, on average, increase after-tax incomes for low-income households and “leave them effectively unchanged for middle-income households.” The Tax Policy Center noted, “The top 1 percent, with at least roughly $1 million in income, would pay an average of $300,000 more than under current law, dropping their after-tax incomes by 14 percent.”

This March, Biden released his  fiscal year 2025 budget , which contains many of the same proposals and adds a few new wrinkles. But it still  does not contain  any “colossal tax hikes” on typical American families, as Trump has said.

Biden’s latest plan proposes — as he has in the past — to increase the corporate income tax rate from 21% to 28%, and to  restore  the top individual tax rate of 39.6% from the current rate of 37%. It would also increase the corporate minimum tax rate from 15% to 21% for companies that report average profits in excess of $1 billion over a three-year period. And the plan would impose a 25% minimum tax on very wealthy individuals. The plan also proposes to extend the expanded child tax credit enacted in the American Rescue Plan through 2025, and to make the child tax credit fully refundable on a permanent basis.

Trump is also mostly wrong that Biden “wants the Trump tax cuts to expire.”

As he has said since the 2020 campaign, Biden’s FY 2025 budget vows not to increase taxes on people earning less than $400,000.

In order to keep that pledge, Biden would have to extend most of the individual income tax provisions enacted in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that are set to expire at the end of 2025. And that’s what Biden says he would do — but  only for  individual filers earning less than $400,000 and married couples making less than $450,000. (In order to pass the TCJA with a simple Senate majority, Republicans wrote the law to have most of the individual income tax changes  expire after 2025 .)

The Biden budget plan “would raise marginal income tax rates faced by higher earners and corporations while expanding tax credits for lower-income households,” according to a Tax Foundation  analysis  of the tax provisions in Biden’s budget. “The budget would redistribute income from high earners to low earners. The bottom 60 percent of earners would see increases in after-tax income in 2025, while the top 40 percent of earners would see decreases.”

Biden on Taxes Paid by Billionaires

In arguing that wealthy households should pay a minimum tax, Biden repeated his misleading claim that billionaires pay an average federal tax rate of 8%.

“We have a thousand … billionaires in America, and what’s happening?”  Biden said . “They’re in a situation where they in fact pay 8.2% in taxes.”

That’s not the average rate in the current tax system; it’s a figure  calculated  by the White House and factors in earnings on unsold stock as income. When only considering income, the top-earning taxpayers, on average, pay higher tax rates than those in lower income groups, as  we’ve written  before.

The top 0.1% of earners pay an average rate of 25.1% in federal income and payroll taxes,  according to  an analysis by the Tax Policy Center in October 2022 for the 2023 tax year.

The point that Biden tried to make is that earnings on assets, such as stock, currently are not taxed until that asset is sold, which is when the earnings become subject to capital gains taxes. Until stocks and assets are sold, the earnings are referred to as “unrealized” gains. Unrealized gains, the White House  has argued , could go untaxed forever if wealthy people hold on to them and transfer them on to heirs when they die.

Roe v. Wade

As he has  before , Trump wildly exaggerated the popularity of ending Roe v. Wade — even going so far as to claim that it was “something that everybody wanted.”

“51 years ago, you had Roe v. Wade and everybody wanted to get it back to the states,”  he said , referring to the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that established a constitutional right to abortion, which was  overturned  in 2022.

Trump:  Everybody, without exception: Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives. Everybody wanted it back — religious leaders. And what I did is I put three great Supreme Court justices on the court and they happened to vote in favor of killing Roe v. Wade, and moving it back to the states. This is something that everybody wanted. Now 10 years ago or so they started talking about how many weeks and how many this and getting into other things. But every legal scholar throughout the world — the most respected — wanted it brought back to the states. I did that.

In fact, a majority of Americans have disagreed with ending Roe v. Wade, including plenty of legal scholars, as we’ve explained  before . While some scholars criticized aspects of the legal reasoning in Roe, it did not necessarily mean they wanted the ruling overturned. Legal experts told us that Trump’s claim was “utter nonsense” and “patently absurd.”

Trump Wrong on Jobs

After Biden talked about job creation during his administration, Trump falsely claimed that “the only jobs [Biden] created are for illegal immigrants and bounced back jobs that bounced back from the COVID.”

In fact, as of May,  total nonfarm employment  in the U.S. had gone up about 6.2 million from the pre-pandemic peak in February 2020, according to figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The increase is about 15.6 million if you count from when Biden took office in January 2021 until now — but that would include some jobs that were temporarily lost during the pandemic and then came back during the economic recovery.

Furthermore, there is no evidence that only “illegal immigrants” have seen employment gains.

Since Biden became president in January 2021, employment of U.S.-born workers has increased more than employment of foreign-born workers, a category that includes anyone who wasn’t a U.S. citizen at birth, as we’ve written before . BLS says the  foreign-born  population includes “legally-admitted immigrants, refugees, temporary residents such as students and temporary workers, and undocumented immigrants.” There is no employment breakdown for just people in the U.S. illegally.

In looking at employment since the pre-pandemic peak, the employment level of  foreign-born workers  was up by about 3.2 million, from roughly 27.7 million in February 2020 to nearly 30.9 million in May. Employment for the  U.S.-born population  increased by about 125,000 — from nearly 130.3 million in February 2020 to 130.4 million, as of May.

Conflicting Budget Deficit Claims

Biden and Trump accused each other of presiding over the largest budget deficit in the U.S.

After talking about Trump’s plans for additional tax cuts, Biden said Trump already had the “largest deficit of any president in American history.” When he got a chance to respond, Trump said, “We now have the largest deficit in the history of our country under this guy,” referring to Biden.

Biden is correct: The  largest budget deficit  on record was about $3.1 trillion in fiscal year 2020 under Trump. However, that was  primarily  because of trillions of dollars in emergency funding that both congressional Republicans and Democrats approved to address the COVID-19 pandemic. Before the pandemic, the largest budget deficit under Trump was about $1 trillion in fiscal 2019.

Meanwhile, the most recent budget deficit under Biden was about $1.7 trillion in fiscal 2023. As of June, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office  projected  that the deficit for fiscal 2024, which ends on Sept. 30, would be about $2 trillion.

Black Unemployment

Biden boasted that on his watch, “Black unemployment is the lowest level it has been in a long, long time.”

It’s true that the unemployment rate for Black or African American people reached a record low of 4.8% in April 2023, but it is currently 6.1%,  according to  the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which has data going back to 1972.

Also, the unemployment rate was low under Trump, too, until the pandemic.

Under Trump, the  unemployment rate for Black Americans  went down to 5.3% in August 2019 – the lowest on record at that time. It shot up to 16.9% in April 2020, when the economic effects of the pandemic took hold. When Trump left office in January 2021, amid the pandemic, the rate was 9.3%.

The rate has been 6% or less in only 29 months since 1972, and it happened only under two presidents: 21 times under Biden and eight times under Trump.

‘Suckers and Losers’

Biden  said  Trump called U.S. veterans killed in World War I “suckers and losers,” which Trump called a “made up quote … that was in a third-rate magazine.”

It was first reported by a magazine — the Atlantic — but Trump’s former chief of staff,  John F. Kelly , a retired four-star Marine general, later seemed to confirm it.

Biden was referring to a trip Trump made to France in November 2018, where he reportedly declined to visit the  Aisne-Marne American Cemetery  near the location of the Battle of Belleau Wood. “He was standing with his four-star general and he told him, ‘I don’t want to go in there because they’re a bunch of losers and suckers.’”

The Atlantic  wrote  about this alleged incident in 2020, citing unnamed sources. The magazine wrote that Trump made his remark about “losers” when he declined to visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, and his remark about “suckers” during that same trip.

The Atlantic, Sept. 3, 2020:  In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.

In October 2023, Kelly – who was on that trip and visited the Aisne-Marne Cemetery — gave a  statement to CNN  that seemed to confirm those remarks. CNN published Kelly’s statement.

CNN, Oct. 3, 2023:  “What can I add that has not already been said?” Kelly said, when asked if he wanted to weigh in on his former boss in light of recent comments made by other former Trump officials. “A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family – for all Gold Star families – on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.”

Trump said, “We had 19 people who said I didn’t say it.” One of those who said that he didn’t hear Trump make those remarks is John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser who was also on the trip and said he was there when the decision was made not to visit the cemetery.

“I didn’t hear that,” Bolton  told the New York Times  in 2020 after the magazine story first appeared. “I’m not saying he didn’t say them later in the day or another time, but I was there for that discussion.”

Biden Misleads on Jobs

Biden ignored the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic when he criticized Trump for employment going down over Trump’s time in office.

“He’s the only president other than Herbert Hoover that lost more jobs than he had when he began,” Biden said.

Job growth during Trump’s term was positive until the economy lost 20.5 million jobs in April 2020, as efforts to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus led to business closures and layoffs. By the time Trump left office in January 2021, employment had partly rebounded, but was still 9.4 million jobs below the February 2020 peak,  according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics .

Trump repeatedly claimed that Biden “caused the inflation” and that “I gave him a country with no essentially no inflation. It was perfect. It was so good.”

It’s true that inflation was relatively modest when Trump was president. The  Consumer Price Index rose 7.6%  under Trump’s four years — continuing a long period of low inflation. And inflation has been high over the entirety of Biden’s time in office. The  Consumer Price Index  for all items rose 19.3% between January 2021 and May.

For a time, it was the worst inflation in decades. The 12 months ending in June 2022 saw a 9% increase in the CPI (before seasonal adjustment), which the  Bureau of Labor Statistics said  was the biggest such increase since the 12 months ending in November 1981.

Inflation has moderated more recently. The CPI  rose  3.3% in the 12 months ending in May, the most recent figure available.

Although Trump claims that Biden is entirely responsible for massive inflation, economists  we have spoken to  say Biden’s policies are only partly to blame. The economists placed the lion’s share of the blame for inflation on disruptions to the economy caused by the pandemic, including supply shortages, labor issues and increased consumer spending on goods. Inflation was then worsened by Russia’s attack on Ukraine, which drove up oil and gas prices, experts told us.

Indeed, inflation has been a  worldwide problem  post-pandemic.

However, many economists say Biden’s policies — particularly aggressive stimulus spending early in his presidency to offset some of the economic damage caused by the pandemic — played a modest role.

Jason Furman , a former economic adviser to President Barack Obama and now a Harvard University professor, told us in June 2022 that he estimated about 1 to 4 percentage points worth of the inflation was due to Biden’s stimulus spending in the  American Rescue Plan  — a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief measure that included $1,400 checks to most Americans; expanded unemployment benefits; and money for schools, small businesses and states.  Mark Zandi , chief economist of Moody’s — whose work is often cited by the White House — said the impact of the stimulus measure now “has largely faded.”

Economists note that the American Rescue Plan came after two other pandemic stimulus laws enacted under Trump that were  worth  a  total  of $3.1 trillion. That spending, too, could have contributed to inflation.

Immigrants Entering U.S. Under Biden

Trump grossly inflated the number of immigrants who have entered the country during the Biden administration — putting the number at 18 million to 20 million. The number, by our calculation, is about a third of that. Trump also claimed, without evidence, that many of those immigrants are from prisons and mental institutions.

“It could be 18, it could be 19, and even 20 million people,” Trump said of the immigrants who have entered the U.S. during the Biden administration. Later in the debate, Trump asked Biden why there had been no accountability “for allowing 18 million people many from prisons, many from mental institutions” into the country.

That’s a greatly exaggerated number. We took a deep dive into the immigration numbers  in February , and again in  mid-June , and we came up with an estimate of at most a third of Trump’s number.

Here’s the breakdown:

Department of Homeland Security data show nearly 8 million encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border between February 2021, the month after Biden took office, and May, the last month of available  statistics . That’s a figure that includes both the 6.9 million apprehensions of migrants caught between legal ports of entry – the number typically used for illegal immigration – and nearly 1.1 million encounters of migrants who arrived at ports of entry without authorization to enter the U.S.

DHS also has comprehensive data, through February, of the initial processing of these encounters. That information shows 2.9 million were removed by Customs and Border Protection and 3.2 million were released with notices to appear in immigration court or report to Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the future, or other classifications, such as parole. (Encounters do not represent the total number of people, because some people attempt multiple crossings. For example, the recidivism rate was 27% in fiscal year 2021,  according to the most recent figures  from CBP.) 

As  we’ve explained before , there are also estimates for “gotaways,” or migrants who crossed the border illegally and evaded the authorities. Based on an average annual apprehension rate of 78%, which DHS provided to us, that would mean there were an estimated 1.8 million gotaways from February 2021 to February 2024. The gotaways plus those released with court notices or other designations would total about 5 million.

There were also 407,500 transfers of unaccompanied children to the Department of Health and Human Services and 883,000 transfers to ICE. The ICE transfers include those who are then booked into ICE custody, enrolled in “ alternatives to detention ” (which include technological monitoring) or released by ICE. We don’t know how many of those were released into the country with a court notice. But even if we include those figures, it still doesn’t get us to anywhere near 18 to 20 million.

And we should note that these figures do not reflect whether a migrant may ultimately be allowed to stay or will be deported, particularly since there is a yearslong backlog of immigration court cases.

Also, as we have  written   repeatedly , Trump has provided no credible support for his incendiary claim that countries are emptying their prisons and mental institutions and sending those people to the U.S. Experts tell us they have seen no evidence to substantiate it.

Earlier this month, we looked into  Trump’s claim as it relates to Venezuela, because Trump has repeatedly cited a drop in crime there to support his claim about countries emptying their prisons and sending inmates to the U.S. Reported crime is trending down in Venezuela, but crime experts in the country say there are numerous reasons for that — including an enormous out-migration of citizens and a consolidation of gang activity — and they have nothing to do with sending criminals to the U.S.

“We have no evidence that the Venezuelan government is emptying the prisons or mental hospitals to send them out of the country, whether to the USA or any other country,” Roberto Briceño-León, founder and director of the independent Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, told us.

Border Under Trump

Trump claimed that “we had the safest border in history” in the “final months” of his presidency, according to Border Patrol. But according to  data  provided by Customs and Border Protection, apprehensions of those trying to cross illegally into the U.S. in the last three full months of Trump’s presidency were about 50% higher than in the  three months  before he took office.

In fact, as we wrote in our piece, “ Trump’s Final Numbers ,” illegal border crossings, as measured by  apprehensions at the southwest border , were 14.7% higher in Trump’s final year in office compared with the last full year before he was sworn in.

But these statistics tell only part of the story. The number of apprehensions fluctuated wildly during Trump’s presidency, from a  monthly  low of 11,127 in April 2017 to a high of 132,856 in May 2019.

Back in April,  we wrote  about a misleading chart that Trump showed to the crowd during a speech in Green Bay, Wisconsin. “See the arrow on the bottom? That was my last week in office,” Trump said. “That was the lowest number in history.” But Trump was wrong on both points.

The arrow was pointing to apprehensions in April 2020, when apprehensions plummeted during the height of the pandemic.

“The pandemic was responsible for a near-complete halt to all forms of global mobility in 2020, due to a combination of border restrictions imposed by countries around the world,”  Michelle Mittelstadt , director of communications for the Migration Policy Institute, told us.

After apprehensions reached a pandemic low in April 2020, they rose every month after that. In his last months in office, apprehensions had more than quadrupled from that pandemic low and were higher than the month he took office.

Trump falsely claimed that “some states” run by Democrats allow abortions “after birth.” As  we have written , that’s simply false. If it happened, it would be  homicide , and that’s  illegal .

“No such procedure exists,” the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists  says  on its website.

The former president  has wrongly said  that abortions after birth were permitted under Roe v. Wade — the Supreme Court ruling that established a constitutional right to abortion until it was  reversed  in 2022. It was not.

Under Roe, states could outlaw abortion after fetal viability, but with exceptions for risks to the life or health of the mother. Many Republicans  have objected  to the health stipulation, saying it would allow abortion for any reason. Democrats say exceptions are needed to protect the mother from medical risks. We should note, late-term abortions  are rare . According to the  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , less than 1% of abortions in the U.S. in 2020 were performed after 21 weeks gestational time.

In June 2022, after Trump had appointed three conservative justices to the Supreme Court, the court  overturned  Roe in a 5-4 ruling. Biden  supports  restoring Roe as “the law of the land,” as he said in his State of the Union address in March.

Trump Calls Border ‘The Most Dangerous Place’

In his focus on the U.S. border with Mexico, Trump  made  the unsupported claim that it is “the most dangerous place in the world.”

It’s true that unauthorized border crossings  can be dangerous  — 895 people died while doing so in fiscal year 2022, which is the most recent year for which the Customs and Border Protection has  data . Most of those deaths were heat related.

And the International Organization for Migration called calendar year 2022 “the deadliest year on record” for migration in the Americas, with a total of 1,457 fatalities throughout South America, Central America, North America and the Caribbean. The organization began tracking deaths and disappearances related to migration in 2014.

“Most of these fatalities are related to the lack of options for safe and regular mobility, which increases the likelihood that people see no other choice but to opt for irregular migration routes that put their lives at risk,” the organization said in its  2022 report .

Trump suggested that the border crossings imperil Americans when he went on to say, “these killers are coming into our country, and they are raping and killing women.”

But, as  we’ve written before , FBI data show a downward trend in violent crime in the U.S., and there’s no evidence to support the claim that there’s been a crime wave driven by immigrants.

Crime analyst Jeff Asher, co-founder of the New Orleans firm  AH Datalytics , told us in May that there’s no evidence in the data to indicate a migrant crime wave.

Similarly, Jeffrey Butts, director of the Research and Evaluation Center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice,  told the New York Times  in February there was no evidence of a migrant crime wave in New York City after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began busing migrants there in April 2022.

“I would interpret a ‘wave’ to mean something significant, meaningful and a departure from the norm,” Butts said at the time. “So far, what we have are individual incidents of crime.”

Also, it’s worth noting that the Institute for Economics and Peace’s  Global Peace Index  — which measures the safety of 163 countries based on 23 indicators, including violent crime, deaths from internal conflict and terrorism — said the “least peaceful country” is Afghanistan, followed by Yemen, Syria, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

In discussing inflation, the former president embellished the degree to which food prices have increased.

“It’s killing people. They can’t buy groceries anymore,” Trump said. “You look at the cost of food, where it’s doubled, tripled and quadrupled. They can’t live.”

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Consumer Price Index for food has  gone up 17.5%  — not 100% to 300% — since January 2021. The Consumer Price Index specifically for groceries, or “food at home,” has  risen 20.8% .

Climate Change

During a short exchange about climate change, Trump boasted that during his tenure “we had the best environmental numbers ever.” It is not clear what he was referring to exactly, but he said if elected president he wanted to have “absolutely immaculate clean water and I want absolutely clean air — and we had it.” He might have been referring to a talking point that Andrew Wheeler, Trump’s former Environmental Protection Agency administrator, had recommended Trump mention during the debate: “CO2 emissions went down” during his administration, as  the Hill reported . 

Greenhouse gas emissions, which are responsible for global warming,  did decline  from 2019 to 2020. But that was “largely due to the impacts of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic on travel and economic activity,” according to the EPA. Emissions increased by 5.7% from 2020 to 2022, once the economy started getting reactivated again, the agency said. 

According to an  analysis by the New York Times , Trump’s administration reversed nearly 100 environmental rules, including 28 regulations on air pollution and emissions, and eight rules that limited water pollution. Reportedly, Trump  recently asked  oil executives and lobbyists to donate to his campaign, promising he would roll back other environmental rules that hurt fossil fuel interests. 

“He’s not done a damn thing for the environment,” Biden said in response, pointing out that Trump had  pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement . “I immediately joined it because if we reach the 1.5 degrees Celsius … there’s no way back,” Biden said. 

As  we’ve reported , although reaching 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, of warming comes with a number of very serious impacts, it is not a point of no return. Scientists agree that every increment of global warming increases these negative impacts, but 1.5 degrees is not a magic number after which everything is doomed, they say. 

Immigrants Living in Hotels

During the debate, Trump  mentioned   twice  that while immigrants crossing the border illegally were “living in luxury hotels,” in New York City and other cities “our veterans are living in the street.”

While it is true that New York City has  provided   hotel   rooms  to migrant families as a temporary shelter solution, there is no evidence that immigrants are being placed in “luxury” hotels. 

In 2023, Mayor Eric Adams  signed  a $275 million contract with the Hotel Association of New York City to house 5,000 migrants. The deal was intended to help  struggling hotels  impacted by the pandemic and did not expect to include luxury hotels. “There are no gold-plated rooms that are being given away contrary to any reports that you may have seen,” the association president  told NY1  at the time. In January, the city  signed  another $77 million contract to shelter migrant families in hotels. 

In April, social media posts falsely claimed immigrants had stormed New York City Hall to demand luxury hotel accommodations. But as the  Associated Press reported , the immigrants were there for a hearing about racial inequities in shelter and immigrant services. 

In 2023, the number of veterans experiencing homelessness increased 7.4% from 2022, according to  data  from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. But homelessness among veterans has been declining in recent years, with a 4% overall reduction within the last three years alone. 

Terrorist Attacks Under Trump

While talking about Iran and terrorism, Trump falsely claimed that “you had no terror, at all, during my administration.” As  we’ve written , there were several acts of terrorism carried out by foreign-born individuals when Trump was in office.

For example, in October 2017, Sayfullo Saipov  used  a truck to run down people in New York City. He killed eight people,  including  Americans and tourists, in an attack carried out on behalf of the Islamic State.

Then in December 2017, Akayed Ullah  detonated  a homemade pipe bomb he was wearing inside a New York City subway station. Ullah  told  authorities he did it in response to U.S. airstrikes against the Islamic State in Syria and other places.

Then in  December 2019 , Second Lt. Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, a member of the Royal Saudi Air Force, shot 11 people at Florida’s Naval Air Station Pensacola, killing three U.S. sailors. Trump’s own attorney general, William Barr,  called  it an act of terrorism in January 2020. “The evidence shows that the shooter was motivated by jihadist ideology,” Barr said in a statement.

China Trade Deficit

When discussing U.S. trade relations with China, Trump said “we have the largest deficit with China.” That’s false, as  we’ve written .

In 2023, the U.S. had a trade deficit with China in goods and services of roughly $252 billion,  according to  revised figures the Bureau of Economic Analysis  released  in early June. The deficit in goods trading was about $279 billion which was partially offset by a roughly $27 billion surplus in the trading of  services  — which can include travel, transportation, finance and intellectual property.

The trade gap with China last year was the lowest it had been since 2009, when it was $220 billion.

In fact, according to BEA data going back to 1999, the highest total U.S.-China trade deficit in goods and services was about $378 billion in 2018 — when Trump was president. Under Biden, the highest trade deficit with China was $366 billion in 2022.

Not ‘Greatest Economy’ Under Trump

Trump falsely said that prior to the pandemic, the U.S. had “the greatest economy in the history of our country. … Everything was locked in good.”

Trump’s boast about creating the “greatest economy in history” is ubiquitous in his campaign speeches. And it’s not true, at least not by the objective measure typically used to gauge the health of the economy.

As  we have written , economists generally measure a nation’s health by the growth of its  inflation-adjusted gross domestic product . Under Trump, growth was modest. Real GDP in Trump’s four years grew annually by 2.5% in 2017, 3% in 2018 and 2.5% in 2019 — before the economy went into a tailspin during the pandemic in 2020, when real GDP declined by 2.2%,  according to  the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

So, in the best year under Trump, U.S. real GDP grew annually by 3%. By contrast, the nation’s economy grew at a faster annual rate  48 times  and under every president before and after Trump dating to 1930, except Barack Obama and Herbert Hoover. The economy grew at more than 3% six of Ronald Reagan’s eight years, including 7.2% in 1984, and it grew 5% or more 10 times under Franklin D. Roosevelt, including 18.9% in 1942.  Under Biden , the GDP grew by 5.8% in 2021 — a post COVID-19 bounce-back — by 1.9% in 2022 and 2.5% in 2023.

Trump’s Was Not Largest Tax Cut in History

As he has many times before, Trump wrongly claimed, “I gave you the largest tax cut in history.” But saying this over and over, as Trump has for years, doesn’t make it any more true.

As  we have been writing  even before the 2017  Tax Cuts and Jobs Act  was enacted into law, while the law provided tax relief to nearly all Americans, it was not the largest tax cut in U.S. history either as a percentage of gross domestic product (the measure preferred by economists) or in inflation-adjusted dollars.

According to a Tax Policy Center  analysis , the law reduced the individual income taxes owed by Americans by about $1,260 on average in 2018. It also reduced the top corporate tax rate from  35% to 21% , beginning in January 2018.

The law signed by Trump was initially projected to cost $1.49 trillion over 10 years,  according to the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation . It could end up costing substantially more if individual tax provisions are extended past 2025. Over the first four years, the average annual cost was estimated to be $185 billion. That was about 0.9% of  gross domestic product  in 2018.

That’s nowhere close to President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax cut, which was 2.89% of GDP over a four-year average. That’s according to a  2013 Treasury Department analysis  on the revenue effects of major tax legislation. Five more tax measures since 1940 had an impact larger than 1% of GDP, and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget  includes  a 1921 measure as also being larger than the 2017 plan. That’s eighth place for Trump’s “biggest tax cut in our history.”

In inflation-adjusted dollars, the Trump-era tax cut is also less than the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012, which comes in at No. 1 with a $320.6 billion cost over a four-year average. And it’s less than tax reductions in 2010 ($210 billion) and 1981 ($208 billion).

Energy Independence

Trump boasted, as he  often does , that “on Jan. 6 [2021], we were energy independent,” implying that’s no longer the case under Biden. But by Trump’s definition, the country remains energy independent.

To be clear, under Trump, the U.S. never stopped  importing  sources of energy,  including crude oil , from other countries. What he likely means is that the country either  produced  more energy than it consumed, or  exported  more energy than it imported. During Trump’s presidency, after years trending in that direction, the U.S. did hit a tipping point where exports of primary energy exceeded energy imports from foreign sources in 2019 and 2020 — the first times that had happened since 1952,  according to  the U.S. Energy Information Administration. 

But contrary to Trump’s suggestion, that has continued in the Biden presidency. The U.S., during Biden’s presidency, has  exported  more energy,  including petroleum , than it imported, and it has  produced  more energy than it consumed. Also, the U.S. is producing record amounts of  oil  and  natural gas  under Biden.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through  our “Donate” page . If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104. 

Bureau of Labor Statistics. “ Unemployment Rate – Black or African American .” Data extracted 27 Jun 2024.

Robertson, Lori. “ Biden’s Tax Rate Comparison for Billionaires and Schoolteachers .” FactCheck.org. 16 Feb 2023.

“ Average Effective Federal Tax Rates – All Tax Units, By Expanded Cash Income Percentile, 2023 .” Tax Policy Center. 14 Oct 2022.

Goldberg, Jeffrey. “ Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’. ” 3 Sep 2020.

Baker, Peter and Maggie Haberman. “ Trump Faces Uproar Over Reported Remarks Disparaging Fallen Soldiers .” 4 Sep 2020.

Tapper, Jake. “ Exclusive: John Kelly goes on the record to confirm several disturbing stories about Trump .” CNN. 3 Oct 2023.

Leiserson, Greg and Danny Yagan. “ What Is the Average Federal Individual Income Tax Rate on the Wealthiest Americans? ” White House. 23 Sep 2021.

Budryk, Zack. “ Trump posts climate talking points online before debate with Biden ”. The Hill. 27 Jun 2024. 

“ Climate Change Indicators: U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions .” EPA. Updated 27 Jun 2024. 

Popovich, Nadja, et al. “ The Trump Administration Rolled Back More Than 100 Environmental Rules. Here’s the Full List. ” The New York Times. 20 Jan 2021. 

Friedman,Lisa, et al. “ At a Dinner, Trump Assailed Climate Rules and Asked $1 Billion From Big Oil. ” The New York Times. 9 May 2024. 

McGrath, Matt. “ Climate change: US formally withdraws from Paris agreement .” BBC. 4 Nov 2020.

Jaramillo, Catalina. “ Warming Beyond 1.5 C Harmful, But Not a Point of No Return, as Biden Claims .” FactCheck.org. 27 Apr 2023. 

Zraick, Karen. “ How Manhattan Hotels Became Refuges for Thousands of Migrants .” New York Times. 23 Mar 2023.

Izaguirre, Anthony. “ New York City limiting migrant families with children to 60-day shelter stays to ease strain on city. ” AP. 16 Oct 2023.

Goldin, Melissa. “ No, immigrants did not storm New York City Hall in pursuit of luxury hotel rooms. ” 17 Apr 2024.

Lazar, David. “ Mayor signs $275 million deal with hotels to house migrants .” Spectrum News NY1. 15 Jan 2023. 

Nahmias, Laura and Fola Akinnibi. “ NYC Pays Over $300 a Night for Budget Hotel Rooms for Migrants .” Bloomberg. 9 Jun 2023. 

Adcroft, Patrick and Spectrum News Staff. “ New York City signs $77M contract with hotels to house migrant families .” Spectrum News. 24 Jan 2024. 

Diaz, Monica. “ Veteran homelessness increased by 7.4% in 2023. ” VA News. 15 Dec 2023.

Robertson, Lori. “ Trump’s False Claim About Roe .” FactCheck.org. 9 Apr 2024.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.  Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: Food at Home in U.S. City Average . Retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Accessed 27 Jun 2024.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.  Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: Food in U.S. City Average . Retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Accessed 27 Jun 2024.

Farley, Robert. “ Trump’s Comments About ‘Cutting’ Entitlements in Context .” FactCheck.org. 15 Mar 2024.

Jaffe, Alan. “ Posts Misrepresent Immigrants’ Eligibility for Social Security Numbers, Benefits .” FactCheck.org. 26 Apr 2024.

Kessler, Glenn. “ No, Donald Trump, migrants aren’t ‘killing’ Social Security and Medicare .” Washington Post. 26 Mar 2024.

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.  All Employees, Total Nonfarm . Accessed 27 Jun 2024.

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.  Employment Level – Foreign Born . Accessed 27 Jun 2024.

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.  Employment Level – Native Born . Accessed 27 Jun 2024.

Robertson, Lori and D’Angelo Gore. “ FactChecking Trump’s Immigration-Related Claims in Phoenix and Las Vegas .” 17 June 2024.

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.  Federal Surplus or Deficit . Accessed 27 Jun 2024.

Congressional Budget Office. “ An Update to the Budget and Economic Outlook: 2024 to 2034 .” Jun 2024.

Gore, D’Angelo and Robert Farley. “ FactChecking Trump’s Iowa Victory Speech .” 18 Jan 2024.

U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs. “ Sayfullo Saipov Charged With Terrorism and Murder in Aid of Racketeering in Connection With Lower Manhattan Truck Attack .” Press release. 21 Nov 2017.

U.S. Attorneys Office, Southern District of New York. “ Akayed Ullah Sentenced To Life In Prison For Bombing New York City Subway Station In 2017 On Behalf Of ISIS .” Press release. 22 Apr 2021.

LaForgia, Michael and Eric Schmitt. “ The Lapses That Let a Saudi Extremist Shoot Up a U.S. Navy Base .” New York Times. 21 Jun 2020.

Robertson, Lori. “ Familiar Claims in a Familiar Presidential Race .” FactCheck.org. 11 Apr 2024.

Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. “ Joint Statement from Elections Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council & the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Executive Committees .” 12 Nov 2020.

Cummings, William, Garrison, Joey and Sergent, Jim. “ By the numbers: President Donald Trump’s failed efforts to overturn the election .” USA Today. 06 Jan 2021.

Election Law at Ohio State. “ Major Pending Election Cases .” Accessed 28 Jun 2024.

GovInfo.gov.  Transcript of hearing before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.  13 Jun 2022.

Kiely, Eugene. “ Trump Ignored Aides, Repeated False Fraud Claims .” FactCheck.org. 14 Jun 2022.

Robertson, Lori. “ Breaking Down the Immigration Figures. ” FactCheck.org. 27 Feb 2024.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection.  Southwest Land Border Encounters.  Accessed 28 Jun 2024.

Department of Homeland Security. “ Alternatives to Detention .” Accessed 28 Jun 2024.

Farley, Robert. “ Trump’s Unfounded ‘Colossal’ Tax Hike Warning .” FactCheck.org. 17 Apr 2024.

Penn Wharton Budget Model. “ The Updated Biden Tax Plan .” 10 Mar 2020.

Tax Policy Center. “ An Analysis of Former Vice President Biden’s Tax Proposals .” 05 Mar 2020.

Watson, Garrett, and Li, Huaqun. “ Details and Analysis of President Joe Biden’s Campaign Tax Plan .” Tax Foundation. 22 Oct 2020.

White House Website.  Biden’s Proposed Fiscal Year 2025 Budget . Accessed 28 Jun 2024.

Kiely, Eugene. “ A Guide to the Tax Changes .” FactCheck.org. 20 Dec 2017.

Tax Foundation. “ Details and Analysis of President Biden’s Fiscal Year 2025 Budget Proposal. ” 21 Jun 2024.

Congress.gov.  Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.  Introduced 20 Dec 2017.

Joint Committee on Taxation. “ Estimated Revenue Effects Of H.R. 1, The ‘Tax Cuts And Jobs Act.’ ” 06 Nov. 2017.

Gambino, Lauren, et al. “ The unprecedented situation at the US-Mexico border – visualized .” Guardian. 7 Feb 2024.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection.  Border Rescues and Mortality Data . Updated 29 Mar 2024.

International Organization for Migration.  The Americas — Annual Regional Overview . 2022.

Farley, Robert. “ Trump’s Bogus Attack on FBI Crime Statistics .” FactCheck.org. 3 Mar 2024.

Institute for Economics & Peace.  Global Peace Index 2023 . June 2023.

For the claim about Trump and the national debt:

Fiscal Data.  Debt to the Penny . fiscaldata.treasury.gov. Updated 27 Jun 2024.

Treasury Direct.  FAQs About the Public Debt . Accessed 27 Jun 2024.

Robertson, Lori. “ Biden Leaves Misleading Impression on U.S. Debt .” FactCheck.org. 13 Aug 2021.

Congressional Budget Office. “ The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2017 TO 2027 .” Jan 2017.

Cubanski, Juliette and Tricia Neuman. “ The Facts About the $35 Insulin Copay Cap in Medicare .” KFF. 12 Jun 2024.

BreachSight

Vendor risk, trust exchange, product features, vendor risk assessments, security questionnaires.

• Security Ratings

Data Leaks Detection

• Integrations

AI Autofill

• Financial Services

eBooks, Reports, & more

Cyber security report examples (3 common styles).

Edward Kost

Cyber security reports are an invaluable tool for keeping stakeholders and senior management informed about your cyber security efforts. This post outlines examples of some of the most popular reporting styles, with a particular focus on a field of cybersecurity drawing increasing interest among executive teams - Vendor Risk Management .

Each of the cyber security report examples in this list have been pulled from the UpGuard platform - learn more about UpGuard’s reporting features .

1. Board Summary Report

The board summary report is a high-level overview of the key factors and KPIs impacting your organization’s overall security posture .

Why is this report useful?

A board summary report is useful for proving the board with quick updates of an organization’s cybersecurity efforts. This report template is a ideal for the board because it offers the minimal level of detail required to understand an organization’s overall cyber risk exposure, making it easy to understand even for those with little technical knowledge.

What features are included in a board summary report for cybersecurity?

An ideal board summary report template should include the following details.

(i). Overall security rating overview

Security ratings are the most convenient method of summarising an organization’s security posture . Drawing upon the same principle as credit card scoring, security ratings represent an organization’s overall “cybersecurity health”, quantified as either a numerical value (ranging from 0-950) or a letter grade (ranging from A-F). These calculations are made by considering multiple attack vectors across commonly exploited attack surfaces - to learn more about this process, refer to this explanation of how UpGuard calculates its security ratings .

Like credit scores, the higher an organization’s secuirty ratings, the less its potential of experiencing a cyber security incident.

By also including a high-level breakdown of security ratings across primary attack vector categories, board members will have visibility in the specific regions of the company’s attack surface most likely to facilitate a breach from a cyberattack, highlighting the sensitive regions of the company's first line of cyber defenses.

Here’s an example of a security ratings overview from a board summary report on the UpGuard platform. The entity in this example and its associated insights are fabricated for illustrative purposes.

‍ ‍ Security ratings are broken down into five attack vector categories - website security, email security, network security, phishing and malware, and brand & reputation. This snapshot also benchmarks the company’s security rating performance across its main competitors. Such key findings could help the board gauge the organization’s potential of closing new high-value relationships over its competitors.

With data breach risks now the primary concern of all scaling strategies, an overview of cyber risk profies is becoming a primary focus of due diligence efforts . And with speed being a critical metric of scalability, potential business partners are more likely to leverage security ratings tools to efficienctly evaulate risk appetite alignement .

In this example, the organization has a relatively low potential of vulnerabilities in information technology being exploited in a phishing attack . However, security measures need to be tightened in the area of email security, which could trigger mitigation efforts such a reviewing security controls and security policies for information security frameworks, such as NIST CSF , or ISO 27001 .

(ii). Security rating changes over time

A security rating overview provides the board with a point-in-time reference for the organization’s security posture performance. To indicate whether the initiatives of your cyber security strategy are improving the strength of your security program over time, a board summary report should also include a trajectory of security posture changes over the last 12 months.

(iii). Vendor risk overview

With cybercriminals increasingly targeting third-party vendors , the board will expect to see an overview of the company’s third-party risk exposure, even in an executive summary .

The most convenient and efficient method of summarizing third-party cybersecurity threat exposure for your entire service provider network is with a graphical vendor risk matrix, measuring security rating distribution across three tiers of vendor criticality, ranging from low impact to high impact.

The inclusion of a vendor cybersecurity risk overview is crucial for effective cybersecurity decision-making at the executive level.

Typically, vendors with the highest potential impact on an organizaiton should they suffer a ransomware attack or data breach would be grouped in the most critical tier, where degree of impact is determined by whether the vendor requires access to sensitive data .

By offering the board a concise snapshot of risk exposure across your critical vendor segment, discussions about preventive measures are focused on remediation strategies with the most significant positive financial impact, keeping board meetings value-focused and efficient.

At the ground level, a vendor tiering strategy is greatly beneficial to security teams, simplifying cyber risk remediation prioritization in incident response and risk assessment processes .

2. Vendor risk assessment report

A vendor risk assessment report summarises the key risk exposure findings of a completed vendor risk assessment.

For newly onboarded vendors, a risk assessment report outlines the framework for the vendor’s risk management strategy. For existing vendors, this report allows senior management to track the efficiency of an implemented risk management strategy. With a growing number of regulators expecting Third-Party Risk Management oversight from executive teams, such reports are an invaluable aid for maintaining awareness of a company’s third-party threat landscape.

What features are included in a vendor risk assessment report for cybersecurity? 

Because they cover such a wide range of third-party security risk insights in detail, vendor risk assessments are quite lengthy. For the sake of brevity, only a few of the main features of a vendor risk assessment report are covered below.

For an overview of UpGuad’s new and improved vendor risk assessment reporting template, watch this video.

(i). Security ratings by category

if your cybersecurity program has integrated security rating technology into its risk exposure tracking processes, the inclusion of a breakdown of security ratings across all monitored attack vector categories will serve as a convenient summary of the findings of the risk assessment.

In this example, the vendor’s overall security risk rating is primarily affected by cyber risks detected from questionnaire responses.

(ii). Remediation summary

A summary of all primary remediation tasks in the pipeline.

(iii). Risk category breakdown

A detailed breakdown of all the cyber risks associated with all of the attack vector categories this risk assessment is mapping to. In this example report template from the UpGuard platform, a breakdown is included for six risk categories:

• Questionnaire Risks
• Website Security
• Email Security
• Network Security
• Phishing & Malware
• Brand & Reputation Risk

Here’s a snapshot of a risk breakdown for just the Questionnaire risk category:

3. Company attack surface report

A company’s attack surface report, referred to as a BreachSight report on the UpGuard platform, provides an overview of the key factors impacting an organization's cybersecurity posture.

An attack surface report is useful for tracking an organization’s internal cybersecurity efforts.

The following features contribute towards a set of cybersecurity insights that are most valuable for keeping senior management informed of the company’s internal cybersecurity performance.

Note: These are just a few of the details included in UpGuard’s breach report, for more comprehensive view of the report, request a free trial of UpGuard .

(i). Competitor analysis

An overview of the company’s security posture performance against its main competitors. Tracking this metric will help senior management evaluate the company’s overall cybersecurity reputation and the likelyhood of winning new partnerships over its competitors.

A snapshot of a security posture benchmarking feature in an example Breachsight report from the UpGuard platform.

(ii). Security rating changes over time across primary attack vector categories

To provide deeper insights into the organization's general cybersecurity performance improvement trend, this report should include an overview of security rating changes over time for all primary cyber risk categories.

Here’s an example of security posture performance in the website security category for the past 12 months.

(iii). Cyber security risk breakdown

To provide a deeper level of insights into security posture trajectories outlined in the previous point, these reports should include a list of detected threats in each risk category, ranked by level of criticality.

Here’s an example for the Network Security category.

Cyber security reporting By UpGuard

The UpGuard platform includes a library of customization cyber security reports to support its end-to-end Vendor Risk Management workflow. With the addition of features streamlining common reporting bottlenecks, such as the ability to export board summary reports into editable PowerPoint presentations, UpGuard removes the stress of keeping stakeholders informed of critical cybersecurity insights.

Reviewed by

Ready to see upguard in action, ready to save time and streamline your trust management process, join 27,000+ cybersecurity newsletter subscribers.

Related posts

The top cybersecurity websites and blogs of 2024.

14 Cybersecurity Metrics + KPIs You Must Track in 2024

What are security ratings cyber performance scoring explained, why is cybersecurity important, what is typosquatting (and how to prevent it), introducing upguard's new sig lite questionnaire.

• UpGuard Vendor Risk
• UpGuard BreachSight
• Product Video
• Release notes
• SecurityScorecard
• All comparisons
• Security Reports
• Instant Security Score
• Third-Party Risk Management
• Attack Surface Management
• Cybersecurity