Joe Biden issued thousands of pardons during his presidency, with the exact total depending on whether you count only formal individual pardons or all mass pardon actions covering many people at once. Public tallies agree that his overall clemency record (pardons plus commutations) ranks at or near the highest of any modern president.

Core numbers

  • A January 2025 fact-check and data review cites 4,245 total acts of clemency (pardons plus commutations) during Biden’s four-year term, counting each person affected as one “act.”
  • A separate news analysis describes Biden as leading U.S. presidents with about 8,064 pardons when large blanket pardons (like broad drug-offense pardons) are counted by the number of people covered, not just by the number of proclamations.
  • Because Biden used several mass pardons for federal and D.C. simple marijuana possession and other nonviolent drug offenses, the total “number of people pardoned” is much higher than the raw count of his official pardon documents.

Why counts differ

  • Some trackers only count formal, named pardons listed by the Justice Department or the White House, which yields a lower number but is easy to verify case by case.
  • Others count every individual whose record was cleared by a broad proclamation (for example, everyone meeting certain drug-offense criteria), which pushes the total into the many thousands.
  • Analysts also separate pardons (forgiving the conviction) from commutations (shortening a sentence), but headline figures about Biden’s clemency often combine them, which explains why you may see both “thousands of pardons” and “thousands of commutations” in different reports.

Simplified takeaway

  • If you mean all people Biden pardoned in any form (including big blanket proclamations), the best available reporting puts the number in the thousands , with one prominent count citing roughly 8,000+ people pardoned.
  • If you mean total clemency actions (pardons plus commutations, counting each person once per action), an independent analysis gives about 4,245 across his presidency.

Information gathered from public data and reporting available on the internet and portrayed here.