During the COVID-19 pandemic, governments worldwide implemented nonpharmaceutical lockdown policies to mitigate the impact of the virus. The effectiveness of these policies depended on public support, and they came with serious consequences for the population. Given that people's perceptions can influence their support for lockdown policies, we aimed to elicit perceptions of policy stringency among people in Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and the United Kingdom in early 2021 as part of the European Covid Survey. We examined the extent to which objective measures of policy stringency and other factors were associated with these perceptions, focusing on disadvantaged populations. We found that objective measures of stringency did not accurately capture the impact of lockdown policies on people. Moreover, we found that socioeconomically disadvantaged people perceived policies as stricter than did less disadvantaged people and that trust in information sources greatly influenced such perceptions. Our findings underscore the importance of understanding factors influencing policy perception to help policy makers develop more effective and equitable infection containment strategies.