Members of the Evangelical Church in Germany 2026

Number of members of the Evangelical Church in Germany from 2004 to 2026

The Evangelical Church in Germany, known by its German initials EKD and also called the Protestant Church in Germany, is one of the country's two great historic Christian churches, but it has been steadily losing members at an accelerating pace for decades. In 2026, the EKD had roughly 16.9 million members, down dramatically from about 25.8 million in 2004 - a loss of nearly 9 million members, or around 35%, in just over two decades. To put that in perspective, the church has lost the equivalent of the entire population of a large German city every few years throughout this period. The decline has been utterly relentless and is, if anything, speeding up, with the church losing around 580,000 members in 2024 alone. This represents one of the steepest and most sustained declines of any major religious institution in the developed world, transforming what was once a pillar of German society into a rapidly shrinking minority faith. The wider European religious picture is explored in our religion in Europe analysis.

The EKD is not a single church but a federation of 20 regional Protestant churches, known as Landeskirchen, that together encompass the vast majority of Germany's Protestants. Each retains considerable autonomy while cooperating on national matters, an arrangement that reflects the historically decentralised nature of German Protestantism. Its membership decline mirrors that of the Roman Catholic Church, and the two together have lost over a million members in a single year on multiple recent occasions. The fact that Germany's two historic state churches are both haemorrhaging members at such a pace underlines how profoundly the country's relationship with organised religion has changed over a single generation. The forces behind the EKD's shrinkage are the same ones reshaping German religion as a whole: record formal departures, an ageing membership where deaths far outnumber baptisms, the financial burden of the church tax, and the deep secularisation of society. The parallel Catholic decline is covered in our share of Catholics in Germany analysis.

This article traces the EKD's membership from 2004 to 2026, charting the steady fall from well over 25 million to under 17 million and examining the reasons behind it. It looks at the record waves of departures, the demographic squeeze of an ageing membership, the comparison with the Catholic Church, the EKD's shrinking share of the population, and what the future may hold for German Protestantism. A contrasting case of a small but stable minority faith is covered in our number of Jehovah's Witnesses in Germany analysis, and the broader global context of faith is discussed in our world religions analysis.

EKD Membership by Year, 2004-2026

The table shows the EKD's steady year-by-year decline, from 25.8 million members in 2004 down to a projected 16.9 million in 2026. The fall is remarkably consistent, with the church shedding several hundred thousand members almost every year without interruption, and the losses growing larger in the most recent years rather than easing. Not a single year in the series shows a recovery or even a pause in the decline. By 2023 the figure had dropped to 18.56 million, by 2024 to 17.98 million, and by 2025 to 17.4 million, each year setting a new low. These figures count registered members of the EKD's 20 regional churches. The shrinking Catholic counterpart has followed an almost identical downward path over the same period.

Two Decades of Steady Decline

The trend line is striking in its consistency: an almost unbroken downward slope from 2004 to 2026, with no period of recovery or even stabilisation. In the mid-2000s the EKD was still losing members at a relatively modest pace, but from around 2014 onward the decline steepened markedly, as formal departures surged to record levels year after year, echoing the marriage trends in our Catholic weddings in Germany by partner religion analysis.

The recent years from 2021 to 2026 show the steepest part of the curve, with annual losses of half a million or more becoming the norm rather than the exception. What was once a gradual erosion has hardened into a steep and predictable annual decline that the church has been unable to arrest despite numerous reform efforts. This acceleration sets the EKD's decline apart from the more gradual erosion seen in some other European churches, where membership has fallen more slowly. The German case stands out for both the speed and the consistency of the loss. The population backdrop is in our world population analysis.

The Record Waves of Departures

A major driver of the EKD's decline is the record number of members who formally leave the church each year through the official process known as Kirchenaustritt. In recent years, hundreds of thousands of Protestants have deregistered annually, with the figure reaching around 380,000 to 400,000 in the peak years and total annual losses, including deaths, exceeding half a million. The act of formally leaving has become increasingly common and socially accepted, no longer carrying the stigma it might once have had, which has made it easier for disengaged members to make their departure official. In many social circles, leaving the church is now seen as an unremarkable administrative step rather than a significant personal or spiritual decision.

These losses combine two distinct flows: the people who actively choose to leave, and the members who die and are not replaced by enough baptisms or new admissions. The EKD's own research has found that for most people who leave, there is rarely a single dramatic reason, but rather a gradual process that often begins with a lack of religious socialisation in childhood and a growing sense that the church is personally irrelevant to their lives. By the time the formal decision to leave is made, the connection to the church has usually already faded to almost nothing. A large majority also cite the savings on church tax as a factor, confirming the cost-benefit calculation many Germans increasingly make about whether church membership is worth its price, a pattern of decline also visible in our religious change in Spain analysis. The financial dimension is covered in our Catholic Church tax revenue in Germany analysis.

Why People Leave the Evangelical Church

Understanding why members leave the EKD requires looking at a combination of personal, financial, and social factors that have built up over decades. According to the EKD's own social science research, the most common path out of the church is not a sudden break but a slow drift, beginning with weak religious upbringing and culminating in a sense that church membership no longer holds any personal meaning. For the majority, religion has simply faded into the background of their lives until the formal act of leaving becomes a logical final step.

Financial considerations also weigh heavily in the decision. In Germany, registered church members pay a church tax of 8 to 9% of their income tax, and surveys have found that around 71% of those who leave cite the savings on this tax as a reason for their departure. While few leave for financial reasons alone, the tax often acts as the trigger that converts a long-standing disengagement into a formal exit. Added to this are more specific grievances some members hold, ranging from disagreements with the church's positions on social and political issues to a general disillusionment with institutional religion in an increasingly secular age.

The picture that emerges is one of a church losing its grip on a society that has fundamentally changed. Where Protestant identity was once a near-automatic inheritance passed down through families and reinforced by community life, it is now an active choice that fewer and fewer Germans make. The default has flipped: where staying in the church used to require no decision at all, today it is remaining a member, rather than leaving, that increasingly demands a conscious commitment. The church tax provides a concrete, recurring reminder of membership that prompts the disengaged to formalise their exit, but the deeper cause is the long retreat of religion from the centre of German life. This is the same broad secularisation reshaping all of Germany's religious institutions across the board.

The Demographic Squeeze: Deaths vs Baptisms

Beyond the people who actively choose to leave, the EKD faces a relentless demographic squeeze that would shrink its membership even without any departures at all. The church's members are, on average, considerably older than the general population, which means that each year far more members die than are born into or baptised into the church. This imbalance between deaths and baptisms has become one of the most powerful forces driving the long-term decline, and it is structurally very difficult to reverse since it is rooted in the age profile of the membership itself, reflecting the wider demographic shifts in our US population by sex and age analysis.

In a typical recent year, the EKD has recorded on the order of 340,000 deaths against only around 140,000 baptisms, producing a natural loss of roughly 200,000 members before a single person formally resigns. Baptism numbers have themselves fallen well below pre-pandemic levels, as fewer families choose to baptise their children and pass on the faith, further weakening the pipeline of new members entering the church, much as recorded in our Finland religious community data. This demographic reality means that even if formal departures stopped entirely tomorrow, the EKD would continue to shrink for years simply through the ageing and death of its existing membership, making a genuine turnaround extremely difficult to achieve.

EKD vs the Catholic Church

Germany's two great Christian churches, the Protestant EKD and the Roman Catholic Church, have followed strikingly similar paths of decline, and they are now very close in size. The Catholic Church remains slightly larger, with around 19 to 20 million members compared to the EKD's roughly 17 million, but both have been shrinking at a comparable pace. In 2024, in a notable convergence, both churches lost almost exactly the same number of members - around 580,000 each - even though the EKD had historically been losing members faster than its Catholic counterpart. This marked the first time the Catholic Church matched the Protestant rate of loss, reflecting a surge in Catholic departures following the abuse scandals of the preceding years.

The parallel decline of the two churches reflects the fact that they face the same underlying pressures: secularisation, ageing memberships, the church tax, and the broad retreat of organised religion from German life. For decades the Protestant church had actually been declining faster, but the gap has narrowed as Catholic departures surged following abuse scandals. Together, the two churches once claimed the overwhelming majority of Germans as members, but today their combined membership has fallen below half the population, with the religiously unaffiliated now the largest single group in the country. This represents a historic inversion of Germany's religious make-up, with the once-dominant churches now collectively a minority. The Catholic side of this story shows the same relentless decline playing out in parallel.

The EKD's Shrinking Share of the Population

As the EKD's absolute membership has fallen, so too has its share of the German population, which is in some ways an even more telling measure of its decline. In 1950, around 59% of West Germans were Protestant, making it the largest religious group in the country by a clear margin. Protestantism was woven deeply into the fabric of West German society, shaping its culture, its institutions, and the rhythms of everyday life for the majority of the population.

By 2026, the EKD's share of the total German population has fallen to around 20%, meaning only one in five Germans is now a member of the Protestant church, compared with three in five just two generations earlier. This is a transformation of historic proportions for a country shaped so deeply by the Reformation. This collapse in relative terms reflects both the falling membership in absolute numbers and the simultaneous growth of the religiously unaffiliated population, which together have squeezed the Protestant share from both directions, a shift comparable to that in our population of Finland by religious community analysis.

The EKD's fall from a majority faith to a minority of around 20% of the population is one of the most dramatic religious transformations in modern German history, all the more striking for having happened within living memory. Older Germans can remember a time when Protestant church membership was simply assumed for the majority of the population. For the first time, the religiously unaffiliated now outnumber Protestants, Catholics, and all other groups, having become the single largest segment of German society at around 47%.

The Protestant church, which once shaped German culture, education, and public life alongside the Catholic Church, now finds itself a shrinking minority institution in an overwhelmingly secular society, a position it would have been unthinkable to imagine just a few generations ago. This places German Protestantism within a wider landscape of religious change sweeping across the world, where historic churches are losing ground to secularisation. For a country that gave birth to the Protestant Reformation five centuries ago, the reduction of its Protestant church to a fifth of the population marks a profound closing of a long historical chapter.

How the EKD Is Organised

The Evangelical Church in Germany is not a single unified church but a federation of 20 regional churches, known as Landeskirchen, which retain considerable independence while cooperating under the EKD umbrella. These regional churches reflect Germany's historical patchwork of Protestant traditions, encompassing Lutheran, Reformed, and United churches, and their boundaries often follow historical regional lines rather than modern state borders. This decentralised structure is a legacy of the way Protestantism developed in the German lands after the Reformation, when individual territories adopted their own church arrangements. Together they cover the vast majority of Germany's Protestant Christians, making the EKD the institutional home of German Protestantism.

Each Landeskirche has its own bishop or church president, synod, and administration, and the EKD as a whole is led by a council and its chair, currently Kirsten Fehrs. This federal structure gives the regional churches significant independence in matters of governance, worship, and finance, while the national body coordinates shared positions and represents German Protestantism as a whole. The federation runs an enormous range of social, educational, and charitable activities through its welfare arm, the Diakonie, which together with its Catholic counterpart Caritas forms one of the largest non-state employers in Germany. Despite its shrinking membership, the EKD therefore retains a substantial institutional footprint, operating hospitals, schools, kindergartens, and social services that touch the lives of millions of Germans well beyond its formal membership. This means the church's social influence extends far wider than its membership numbers alone would suggest, even as that membership continues to fall. This institutional weight gives the church a continuing significance even as its core membership declines.

The Future of the Evangelical Church in Germany

Looking ahead, the outlook for EKD membership is one of continued and likely accelerating decline. With an ageing membership ensuring that deaths will keep outpacing baptisms, and with formal departures showing no sign of slowing, the church is projected to keep losing members at a rate of several hundred thousand a year. The EKD's own internal projections have suggested that its membership could roughly halve again by 2060, potentially falling to around 9 to 10 million, with its share of the population continuing to slide well below current levels. Such a future would leave the Protestant church as a relatively small minority institution in a country it once helped define.

The church is acutely aware of this trajectory and has launched various reform and outreach efforts to try to slow the decline, ranging from new forms of worship to digital outreach and structural reorganisation, though none has yet succeeded in reversing the underlying trend. The scale of the demographic and social forces involved has so far overwhelmed every attempt at renewal, leaving church leaders to manage decline rather than reverse it. Many within the EKD have begun to focus less on halting the fall and more on adapting the church to a future as a smaller, more committed community.

The fundamental challenge is that the EKD is losing members through deep structural forces - demographic ageing and societal secularisation - that no amount of institutional reform can easily counter. These forces operate largely independently of anything the church itself does, which is why reform initiatives have so far failed to bend the curve of decline. While the church will remain a significant presence in German society for the foreseeable future, given its size and institutional reach, the era in which Protestantism was a defining feature of German identity has clearly drawn to a close, replaced by an increasingly secular national culture in which religious affiliation is the exception rather than the rule. The EKD's long decline is, in this sense, a barometer of one of the most profound social transformations in modern German history. The economic backdrop is in our global economy analysis.

EKD Membership - Key Statistics

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