Eutrophication represents a major threat to freshwater systems and climate change is expected to drive further increases in freshwater primary productivity. However, long-term in-situ data is available for very few lakes and makes identifying trends and drivers of eutrophication challenging. Using remote sensing data, we conducted a retrospective analysis of long-term trends in trophic status across the Intermountain West, a region with understudied water quality trends and limited long-term datasets. We found that most lakes (55%) were not exhibiting shifts in trophic status from 1984-2019. Our results also show that increases in eutrophication were rare (3% of lakes) during this period, and that lakes exhibiting negative trends in trophic status were more common (17% of lakes). Lakes that were not trending occupied a wide range of lake and landscape characteristics, whereas lakes that were becoming less eutrophic tended to be in more heavily developed catchments. Our results highlight that while there are well-established narratives that climate change can lead to more eutrophication of lakes, this is not broadly observed in our dataset, with more lakes becoming more oligotrophic than lakes becoming eutrophic.