The performance of the ATLAS muon trigger system is evaluated with proton–proton collision data collected in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV. It is primarily evaluated using events containing a pair of muons from the decay of $Z$ bosons. The efficiency of the single-muon trigger is measured for muons with transverse momentum $25 < p_\mathrm{{T}}< 100$ GeV, with a statistical uncertainty of less than 0.01 % and a systematic uncertainty of 0.6 %. The $p_\mathrm{{T}}$ range for efficiency determination is extended by using muons from decays of $J/\psi $ mesons, $W$ bosons, and top quarks. The muon trigger shows highly uniform and stable performance. The performance is compared to the prediction of a detailed