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 [Formula: see text] bosons. The efficiency of the single-muon trigger is measured for muons with transverse momentum [Formula: see text] GeV, with a statistical uncertainty of less than 0.01 % and a systematic uncertainty of 0.6 %. The [Formula: see text] range for efficiency determination is extended by using muons from decays of [Formula: see text] mesons, [Formula: see text] bosons, and top quarks. The muon trigger shows highly uniform and stable performance. The performance is compared to the prediction of a detailed simulation.