Proportion of Catholics in Spain 2011-2026

Share of the Spanish population who consider themselves Catholic from October 2011 to March 2026

Spain was for centuries one of the most Catholic countries in Europe, its national identity bound tightly to the Church. That bond is loosening fast. The share of people who consider themselves Catholic has slid from about 71% in October 2011 to roughly 54% by March 2026, a fall of some 17 percentage points in a single generation. Catholics are still the largest group by far and remain a clear majority, but the country is changing more quickly than the headline majority suggests. The same broad retreat of established religion, paired with the growth of newer faiths through migration, is visible across the continent, including in the patterns we document in our Muslim residents in Italy by country of origin analysis. Spain's trajectory is one of the clearest examples of European secularisation in motion. The pace and breadth of the shift make Spain a revealing case study in how quickly a once-uniform religious culture can fragment.

The decline has been steady rather than abrupt, with the steepest drops coming in the early 2020s. From around 71% in 2011 the Catholic share eased into the high sixties by the late 2010s, then fell more sharply to about 60% by 2021 and into the mid-fifties by the mid-2020s, reaching 56.1% in June 2025 and around 54% in early 2026. The most striking feature is not that Spaniards have abandoned the Catholic label outright, but that the label increasingly means cultural background rather than active faith. A clear majority still tick the Catholic box, yet only a small minority attend Mass with any regularity, and the gap between nominal identity and lived practice has become the defining feature of religion in modern Spain, much as it has elsewhere in Catholic Europe. What was once an automatic inheritance, passed down without question, has become for many Spaniards a loose label they neither examine nor act upon.

These figures come from the monthly barometers of the CIS, Spain's Centre for Sociological Research, a state body whose surveys are widely treated as the authoritative gauge of Spanish opinion. Since 2019 the CIS has split the Catholic category into practicing and non-practicing respondents, and the figures shown here combine the two for a consistent long-run series. Because the barometers are run almost every month, individual readings bounce around by a point or two, so the trend matters more than any single month. Read that way, the direction is unmistakable: a long, accelerating drift away from Catholic identity, mirrored by a steady rise in the share of Spaniards who describe themselves as non-believers, atheists or agnostics, a shift this report traces across age, gender, region and time. Reading the series this way guards against the temptation to over-interpret any single barometer, which can swing by a couple of points for reasons unrelated to the underlying trend.

Catholic and Non-Religious Share in Spain by Year: Full Table

The two columns move almost as mirror images. As the Catholic share has slipped from 71% to about 54%, the non-religious share, combining atheists, agnostics and the indifferent, has climbed from roughly 23% to about 41%. The crossover point at which non-religious Spaniards might outnumber Catholics has not yet arrived, but the gap has narrowed dramatically, from nearly fifty points in 2011 to barely a dozen by 2026. Believers of other religions, not shown separately here, account for only around 3% of the total in the barometers, a figure widely thought to understate Spain's growing Muslim, Protestant and Orthodox communities. The numbers make plain that Spain is not so much swapping one faith for another as moving, steadily and broadly, toward no religious affiliation at all, a transition still in progress rather than complete. Where immigration has reshaped the religious map, as our religious affiliation of foreigners in Italy analysis shows, minority faiths loom far larger than Spain's own barometers suggest.

The Mirror Image: Spain's Non-Religious Surge

The flip side of falling Catholic identity is the rapid rise of the non-religious. Combining atheists, agnostics and those who call themselves indifferent or non-believers, this bloc has grown from around 23% of the population in 2011 to about 41% by 2026, very nearly doubling. On the longer Ferrer i Guardia series, which defines non-religious slightly differently, the share has more than quadrupled since 1980. The growth is broad-based but concentrated among the young and the educated, and it shows little sign of slowing. This is the same secularising current that has reshaped religious belonging across the developed world, including the trends in our religion in England and Wales analysis, where the non-religious have become one of the largest groups. In Spain the shift is unusually rapid, compressing into two decades a change that took longer elsewhere.

Within that bloc, atheists are now the single largest component, at about 17%, ahead of agnostics at around 13% and the indifferent or non-believers at roughly 11%. All three categories have grown, but the rise of self-described atheism is the most pointed, reflecting a generation increasingly willing to reject religion outright rather than simply drift from practice. The speed of the change owes much to Spain's particular history: a rapid transition from a Church-dominated dictatorship to a liberal democracy after 1975 compressed into a few decades a secularisation that unfolded more gradually in northern Europe. The pandemic years, when churches closed and many habits broke, appear to have given the trend a further push, with the sharpest single drop in Catholic identity coming in the early 2020s before stabilising in the mid-fifties. Whether that plateau holds or proves merely a pause before further decline is one of the most closely watched questions in Spanish sociology.

The decline is not uniform across Spain. Secularisation has gone furthest in the big cities and the wealthier, more educated regions of the north and east, such as Catalonia and the Basque Country, while Catholic identity remains somewhat stronger in rural areas and parts of the south. The shift also has a political dimension, with religious identity increasingly aligned with the left-right divide, so that practicing Catholics lean conservative and the non-religious lean to the left. These cleavages make religion a live marker of social and political identity rather than a settled background fact. They also help explain why debates over the Church's role in schools, public funding and historic privileges remain so charged, even in a country where active belief has thinned: religion in Spain is now contested terrain rather than common ground, fought over in politics and the culture wars even as the pews themselves grow quieter and greyer with each passing year.

How Spaniards Define Themselves in 2026

Broken into its parts, the picture in early 2026 is of a Catholic majority that is mostly non-practicing, alongside a large and varied non-religious population. Around 36% of Spaniards call themselves non-practicing Catholics and about 18% practicing Catholics, together making up the 54% Catholic total. Atheists account for roughly 17%, agnostics about 13% and the indifferent or non-believers around 11%. Believers of religions other than Catholicism make up only about 3% in the barometers, a category that includes Muslims, Protestants and others and is widely held to understate those communities, as our non-Catholic believers in Spain analysis explains. The single largest group of all is therefore non-practicing Catholics: people who keep the cultural label of the Church while playing little or no part in its life or worship, the heart of Spain's nominal Catholicism. It is a form of belonging that may not survive the generational handover, since the young are far less likely even to claim the cultural label.

Practicing and Non-Practicing Catholics Over Time

Splitting Catholics into practicing and non-practicing reveals where the decline has really bitten. Since the CIS began separating the two in 2019, the practicing share has held remarkably steady, hovering between about 18% and 22% of the population, even as the overall Catholic figure has fallen. The shrinkage has come almost entirely from non-practicing Catholics, whose share dropped from around 46% in 2019 to about 36% by 2026. In other words, the people leaving the Catholic label are overwhelmingly those who already had little active connection to the Church, while the committed core has proved more durable. This pattern of a stable practicing minority amid a melting cultural majority echoes what we see in our Catholic weddings in Germany analysis, where formal religious milestones persist among a committed few even as broad affiliation erodes across the wider population. The committed remnant, though smaller, tends to be more visible and more organised than its numbers alone would imply.

Catholic Identity by Age Group in Spain

Age is the sharpest dividing line in Spanish religion. Only about a third of those aged 18 to 24, and roughly 38% of those aged 25 to 34, identify as Catholic, against close to three-quarters of those over 65. The young are not only less likely to call themselves Catholic but far more likely to describe themselves as atheist or agnostic, so that the non-religious are a clear majority among the youngest adults. Interestingly, recent CIS data hints that the retreat may be slowing among the very youngest, with around one in three under-25s still identifying as Catholic, prompting talk of a possible plateau. Even so, the generational gap is vast, and it points to further decline as older, more religious cohorts pass on, a dynamic that also runs through our belief in God in the UK analysis of how faith fades across generations. The arithmetic of demography points firmly in a single direction.

How Often Spaniards Attend Mass

If Catholic identity has fallen, religious practice has collapsed even faster. Among Spaniards who identify as religious, about a quarter say they never attend Mass and another fifth barely ever do, so close to half are effectively non-attending. Only around 12% go every Sunday and on the main holidays, with a further 4% to 5% attending several times a week, and the rest dropping in a few times a year. The share who never attend has risen steadily, from around 55% of Catholics in 2011 to well over 60% by the early 2020s. This is the same hollowing-out of weekly worship that we document in our weekly church attendance in Italy analysis, where regular Mass-going has roughly halved since 2001. Across Catholic southern Europe, the pew has emptied faster than the parish register. For many Spaniards, attending Mass has become an occasional ritual tied to weddings, funerals and Christmas rather than a weekly habit.

Catholic Spain Across the Decades

Zooming out beyond the CIS barometers shows just how far Spain has travelled. In the mid-1970s, at the end of the Franco era, around nine in ten Spaniards identified as Catholic. That share fell to roughly 80% by the year 2000, to about 71% by 2011, and to around 54% by 2026, a near-halving of the religious majority within living memory. The decline tracks the country's transformation into a wealthy, urban, highly educated democracy, the same combination of forces that has eroded traditional religion across the developed world, as our world religions analysis sets out. Spain stands out less for the direction of travel than for the speed: a society that was officially Catholic within living memory now has one of the fastest-secularising populations in Europe, with the under-35s already majority non-religious and the trend still pointing downward. Barring an unexpected revival, the only real question is how fast the remaining majority continues to erode.

In a European frame, Spain now sits in the middle of the pack. It is far less religious than Poland or Portugal, where Catholic identity remains the overwhelming norm, but still more Catholic in name than the largely secular Czech Republic, the Netherlands or Scandinavia. Its closest parallels are France and Italy, fellow historically Catholic countries where nominal affiliation remains high but practice has fallen away, a comparison we set out in our religion in Europe analysis. What marks Spain out is the pace of change: a country that entered the 1980s as a Catholic society has, in barely four decades, arrived at a point where almost half its people claim no religion, a transformation few would have predicted at the end of the dictatorship. The transformation has unfolded peacefully and almost silently, registered not in dramatic events but in the steady monthly drift of the barometer figures themselves.

What happens next depends largely on the young. If the tentative signs of a plateau among the under-25s prove real, the Catholic share may level off above the non-religious one for a time. If, as the longer trend suggests, each new cohort is simply less religious than the last, the two lines will eventually cross. Either way, the Church faces a population that is older, more female and more loosely attached than at any point in modern Spanish history, and the monthly barometers will keep charting the change. For now the headline is straightforward enough: Spain in 2026 is still a majority-Catholic country in name, a minority-Catholic one in practice, and, on the evidence of every recent survey, a steadily less religious one with each passing year, and the gap is narrowing all the time.

Catholic Identity and Practice by Gender

Religion in Spain is also gendered. Women are consistently more likely than men both to identify as Catholic and, more strikingly, to practice. Around 28% of women describe themselves as practicing Catholics, against roughly 16% of men, and women also report higher overall Catholic identification. The gap appears across nearly every age band and mirrors a pattern seen throughout Europe, where women tend to sustain religious practice longer than men even as overall affiliation declines. The reasons are debated, ranging from differences in socialisation and caregiving roles to distinct attitudes toward mortality and meaning. Whatever the cause, the gender gap means the shrinking core of practicing Catholics in Spain is disproportionately female and older, a profile that has implications for parish life and for how the Church engages a population in which men, and the young of both sexes, are drifting away fastest. The result is a worshipping community whose centre of gravity is steadily ageing.

What Changed: Shifts by Category, 2019 to 2026

Looking at how each category has moved since 2019 isolates where the change has happened. Non-practicing Catholics have fallen by about 10 percentage points, the single biggest shift, while practicing Catholics are down a smaller 4 to 5 points. On the other side, atheists and agnostics have each risen by around 5 to 6 points, and believers of other religions have edged up only marginally. The arithmetic is clear: Spain's secularisation is driven mainly by nominal Catholics letting go of the label and a parallel rise in active non-belief, not by a surge in minority faiths. This contrasts with countries where the religious map is being redrawn chiefly by immigration, such as the picture in our evangelical church members in Germany analysis. In Spain the story is overwhelmingly one of home-grown secularisation rather than religious replacement. The contrast is instructive, because it shows that secularisation and migration can reshape a country's religion through quite different mechanisms.

Catholics in Spain 2011-2026: The Key Numbers

Pulling the figures together, Spain in 2026 is a country of nominal Catholics and rising non-believers. About 54% still consider themselves Catholic, but only around 18% practice, while the non-religious bloc of roughly 41% breaks down into about 17% atheists, 13% agnostics and 11% indifferent or non-believers. Believers of other faiths add a further 3% or so. The Catholic share has fallen some 17 points since 2011, the decline is steepest among the young and among men, and weekly Mass attendance has dropped even faster than identity. Spain remains far more Catholic in name than countries such as Germany, profiled in our Catholic population in Germany analysis, yet the direction of travel is the same, and the gap between the two is closing with each passing barometer. The convergence of the two lines, once unimaginable in so Catholic a country, now looks less like a possibility than a matter of timing.

Taken together, the data describes a Catholic country in the slow process of becoming a secular one. The label still commands a majority, but it increasingly marks heritage rather than belief, and the active, churchgoing Catholic is now a clear minority, older and more often female than the population at large. For the Church, for policymakers and for researchers, the lesson is to read identity and practice separately rather than relying on the headline majority, and to track each new CIS barometer as the trend unfolds. The forces behind the shift, namely wealth, education, urbanisation and generational change, are the same ones reshaping populations worldwide, as our world population analysis makes clear, and on current trends Spain's non-religious may rival its Catholics within a decade. If that crossover arrives, it will mark a profound symbolic shift for a nation whose history, art and calendar remain saturated with Catholic tradition even as belief recedes.

Frequently Asked Questions: Catholics in Spain