MisleadingCharts

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Every chart in the collection. Flip any card between the misleading original and the honest redraw.

MisleadingCharts

A gallery of misleading charts, growing by one chart a day. Each comes with a short explanation of the technique it uses.

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Greatest hits

The truncated axis
Dual y-axes
The inverted axis
Uneven intervals
The log scale
All 40 techniques →

House rules

Axes start at zero.
Pies sum to 100%.
One new chart a day.

For the record. Misleading Charts is an education project, updated daily by an automated agent that researches and writes up each new chart. Charts are shown for commentary and critique, credited and linked to their original sources wherever possible. Appearing here is not an accusation of bad faith — most misleading charts are honest mistakes.

© 2026 Misleading Charts. Y-axis not to scale.

60 charts on the wall

Dark keynote-style bar chart titled “The web’s favorite framework” ranking npm downloads for the week of July 2–8, 2026: Vue first in gold at 12.9M, annotated “more than double its closest rival”, above Angular 5.5M, Svelte 4.9M, Solid 2.8M, Alpine.js 562K and Ember 244K — with React nowhere on the chart

The same week of npm downloads with everyone included: React towers at 146M, annotated “left off the first chart — 5× the whole lineup combined”, Preact follows at 23.4M with a footnote that it mostly arrives as a dependency of other packages, and Vue’s gold 12.9M bar — “the web’s favorite, one chart ago” — shrinks to a sliver, with a caption noting downloads count CI robots and transitive installs, not developers

The framework race React wasn’t invited to

The convenient comparison

Dark Steam-styled bar chart titled “The best-rated games on Steam” ranking games by percent positive reviews on an axis that starts at 95%: Street of the Cats first at 100% in gold, labelled “a perfect game”, above Portal 2 (98.7%), Stardew Valley (98.5%), Hades (98.0%), Left 4 Dead 2 (97.5%), Factorio (97.5%), Terraria (97.4%) and The Witcher 3 (96.8%) — with no review counts shown anywhere

The same eight games as a dot plot with 95% confidence intervals and review counts shown, ranked by the interval’s floor: Portal 2 first, pinned to ±0.03 points by 462,861 reviews, while Street of the Cats falls to last — its 96 unanimous reviews stretch its interval from 96.2% to 100%, annotated as “a four-point-wide shrug”

The greatest game of all time has 96 reviews

Phantom precision The truncated axis

$Pictogram titled “The Shrinking Family Doctor,” redrawn after the 1979 Los Angeles Times original: three doctor figures for 1964 (27%), 1975 (16.0%) and 1990 (12.0%), each scaled in both height and width so the 1990 doctor is a tiny fraction of the first, with the three years spaced evenly despite 11- and 15-year gaps$

The same three values on a plain line chart with a zero-based axis and years positioned correctly: 27% in 1964 falling to 16.0% in 1975, then a dashed segment to an open marker at 12.0% in 1990, labelled as a projection made in 1979

The family doctor who shrank in two dimensions

The area illusion Uneven intervals

Dark gold-on-black line chart titled “Gold: up 955% since 2001” showing the annual average gold price climbing from $271 in 2001 to $2,860 in 2025, annotated “more than 10× your money”, with no data shown before 2001

The full annual average gold price from 1971 to 2025 with two shaded windows: starting in 1980 the price falls 56% by 2001, and starting in 2001 it rises 955% by 2025 — the same line supporting opposite stories depending on the chosen start date

The 955% gold rally that starts exactly at the bottom

The cherry-picked window

Line chart titled “Why your cat wants the top floor” plotting average injuries per cat against stories fallen; the line climbs from 0.76 injuries at 2 stories to a peak of 2.4 at 7–8 stories, then a red arrow plunges to 1.1 at 9–32 stories, beside a cartoon cat asking for “Top floor, please” and a caption reading “Higher is safer!”

The same curve redrawn in grey with hollow markers; a hatched red band over the 9–32-story column is labelled “NOT HERE: cats killed on impact”, with a note explaining the clinic only ever met cats that arrived alive, so the dip at high floors is a survivor’s curve, not safety

The cat-fall chart that only counted the survivors

Survivorship bias

Bar chart titled “Where our bombers are getting hit” showing bullet holes per square foot on returning planes — rest of plane 1.80, fuselage 1.73, fuel system 1.55, engines 1.11 — with a red bracket over the two tallest bars labelled “add armor here”

The same four bars re-read Wald’s way: the engines bar, lowest at 1.11, is highlighted in blue with an “armor here” arrow, because the planes hit in the engine were shot down and never returned to be counted

The bomber-armor chart that pointed at the wrong parts

Survivorship bias

Horizontal bar chart titled “Where the aliens are landing” showing raw UFO sighting counts by state, with California towering at 17,158, then Florida 8,880, Washington 7,633, Texas 6,719, New York 6,346, Pennsylvania 5,395, Arizona 5,347, Ohio 4,728

The same sightings drawn per 100,000 residents, where the leaderboard flips: Vermont 92, Washington 90, Montana 87, Alaska 86, Maine 84, New Hampshire 83, Oregon 82, New Mexico 77 — and California, first in raw counts, falls to about 44

The UFO hotspot chart that was really just a population map

The missing denominator

Line chart titled “Gun deaths in Florida” with the y-axis inverted — 0 at the top, 1000 at the bottom — and a red area hanging from the top edge, so the post-2005 rise in firearm murders dives downward and looks like a decline; a dashed line marks 2005, when Florida enacted its “Stand Your Ground” law, and a footer notes the chart is redrawn in the spirit of the one Reuters published in 2014, from Florida Department of Law Enforcement firearm-murder counts

The same firearm-murder series on a normal zero-based axis, revealing a long decline that bottoms out near 1999 and then spikes from 521 in 2005 to 825 in 2007

The Florida gun-death chart that ran upside down

The inverted axis

Pie chart titled “What America puts on its pizza” with five slices — pepperoni 64%, sausage 56%, mushrooms 54%, extra cheese 52%, onions 48% — drawn as a single complete circle even though the labels sum to 274%

Horizontal bar chart of the same five toppings on a 0–100% axis, each bar the share of US adults who like that topping, with a note that a select-all question sums to 274%, not 100

The pizza pie whose slices add up to 274%

The impossible pie

Line chart titled “iPhone — cumulative sales” showing a smooth, ever-steepening curve from 2007 to 2013, with no y-axis scale at all

Bar chart of iPhone unit sales per quarter, where a 47.8-million holiday peak is followed by two declining quarters of 37.4 and 31.2 million going into the September 2013 keynote

The iPhone sales curve that could not go down

The ever-rising cumulative

Dual-axis line chart titled “Margarine is tearing Maine apart” where Maine’s divorce rate and US margarine consumption trace nearly identical declining lines, annotated with correlation 0.9926

The same two series drawn as separate panels on zero-based axes, each showing a gentle decade-long decline through the 2000s

Margarine and the divorce rate in Maine: a love story

Spurious correlation Dual y-axes

Bar chart titled “Top Tax Rate” with a y-axis starting at 34%, so the 39.6% bar towers over the 35% bar

The same two rates on a zero-based axis, where the bars are nearly the same height and the gap is labelled 4.6 points

The 4.6-point tax hike that looked like a cliff

The truncated axis

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