Share of non-religious people in Spain 1980-2026

Share of non-religious people in Spain from 1980 to 2026

In the space of two generations, Spain has been transformed from one of the most uniformly Catholic societies in Europe into one where a large and growing minority profess no religion at all. The share of non-religious people, combining atheists, agnostics and the indifferent, has surged from about 8.5% in 1980 to roughly 41% by 2026, almost a fivefold increase. The non-religious are now the second-largest group in the country, behind only Catholics, and among adults under 35 they are already a clear majority. This rise is the mirror image of the falling Catholic affiliation broken down in our religious affiliation by age group in Spain analysis, where each younger cohort enters adulthood markedly less religious than the last. The story of modern Spanish religion is, in large part, the story of this single rising line. It is a line that has come to define how the country thinks about faith, identity and the place of the Church in public life.

The growth has not been steady. Through the 1980s and 1990s the non-religious share crept up only slowly, from 8.5% to around 12% by the turn of the century, as Catholic identity remained the overwhelming norm. The real acceleration came after 2000, with the figure roughly doubling to around 22% by 2010 and then climbing past 30% in the late 2010s and close to 40% in the early 2020s. This trajectory closely tracks the decline in Catholic self-identification charted in our proportion of Catholics in Spain analysis, since almost everyone leaving the Catholic label has moved into the non-religious column rather than to another faith. The two series are, in effect, opposite sides of the same coin, and together they capture the speed of Spain's secular turn. Seen side by side, the rise of unbelief and the retreat of Catholicism are not two separate trends but one, viewed from opposite ends, and they have moved in almost perfect step for four decades.

The figures here draw on the Ferrer i Guardia Foundation, which maintains the long 1980 to 2026 series, and on the CIS, Spain's Centre for Sociological Research, whose monthly barometers provide the detailed recent breakdowns. The pattern is part of a broad wave of secularisation across the wealthy world, the same current traced in our world religions analysis, though Spain's version has been unusually rapid given how Catholic the country was within living memory. Definitions of non-religious differ slightly between sources, so the exact totals vary by a point or two, and the long historical series should be read as indicative of the trend rather than precise year by year. The direction and scale of the change, however, are not in doubt. For that reason the charts in this report are best read as a map of a fast-moving landscape rather than a fixed portrait, with the newest readings and the youngest cohorts offering the clearest guide to where the country is heading next.

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

The table lays the transformation out year by year. In 1980, fewer than one in ten Spaniards were non-religious and around nine in ten were religious, overwhelmingly Catholic. By 2026 those proportions have shifted dramatically, to roughly four in ten non-religious against fewer than six in ten religious. The two columns have not yet crossed, and on these figures the religious still hold a narrow majority nationally, but the gap has shrunk from more than eighty points in 1980 to around fifteen by 2026. The steepest movement came after 2010, when the non-religious share jumped by nearly twenty points in fifteen years. Read alongside the age data, where the young are already majority non-religious, the table makes clear that the national crossover is now a question of when rather than if. The 35-44 band already sits close to the dividing line nationally, so the moment when the non-religious become the largest single group is now visible on the horizon rather than a distant abstraction.

It is worth being precise about what that crossover would and would not mean. The non-religious overtaking the religious would not make Spain an officially secular or anti-clerical country, nor would it empty its churches overnight, since cultural Catholicism and the rhythms of fiestas and family tradition still run deep. What it would mark is the end of religion as the default identity of the Spanish majority, a symbolic threshold for a nation whose history, art and calendar remain saturated with the faith. On current trends that threshold is a matter of years, not decades, away.

The Mirror Image: Falling Religious Affiliation

Plotted as its mirror, the decline of religious affiliation traces the same arc in reverse. The share of Spaniards affiliated with a religion, almost all of them Catholic, has fallen from around 90% in 1980 to about 56% by 2026, a loss of more than thirty percentage points. The fall was gentle at first and then steep, accelerating in lockstep with the rise of the non-religious. Crucially, this is not a story of Spaniards swapping Catholicism for other faiths: believers of religions other than Catholicism remain a small minority, so the religious decline maps almost exactly onto the secular rise. Spain remains far more religious in name than countries such as Germany, profiled in our Catholic population in Germany analysis, but the direction and pace of change are strikingly similar, and the gap between the two is closing year on year. On these numbers, the two lines look set to meet within a single generation rather than at some far-off date.

Who Are Spain's Non-Religious?

The non-religious are not a single group but a spectrum of unbelief. Of the roughly 41% who claim no religion in 2026, atheists are the largest component, at about 17% of the total population or some 41% of the non-religious bloc. Agnostics follow at around 13% of the population, and those who describe themselves as indifferent or simply non-believers make up the remaining 11% or so. The boundaries between these labels are blurry, and many in the agnostic and indifferent groups retain a loose, cultural spirituality without belonging to any church. Believers of religions other than Catholicism, by contrast, remain a small share, as our non-Catholic believers in Spain analysis sets out. So the rise of the non-religious is overwhelmingly a move away from religion altogether, not a reshuffling between faiths. That distinction matters, because a country losing believers to indifference behaves very differently from one in which the faithful are being replaced by adherents of new and growing religions.

How Each Non-Religious Group Has Grown

Tracking the three components since 2011 shows that all have grown, but not equally. Atheists have risen from around 9% of the population to about 17%, agnostics from roughly 6% to 13%, and the indifferent or non-believers from about 8% to 11%. The sharpest growth has been in self-described atheism, a more decisive stance than the vaguer categories, which suggests Spaniards are not merely lapsing from practice but increasingly rejecting religious belief outright. A small countercurrent runs the other way through immigration, which adds modestly to the non-Catholic religious population much as it does in the patterns set out in our religious affiliation of foreigners in Italy analysis, but this is dwarfed by the home-grown growth of non-belief. The Spanish story is one of secularisation from within, not religious change driven from outside. The blurred edges between the categories also mean the true non-religious share is probably understated, since some nominal Catholics hold no real belief and would sit more naturally in the secular column.

Non-Religious Share by Age Group

Age is the strongest single predictor of who is non-religious in Spain. About 62% of those aged 18 to 24 and 57% of 25-34s claim no religion, against just 24% of the over-65s, with the share falling smoothly across the bands in between. In other words, the non-religious are a clear majority among the young and a clear minority among the old. This steep age gradient, examined in detail in our belief in God in the UK analysis of generational change, is the main engine behind the long-term national rise: as older, more religious cohorts pass on, they are replaced by far more secular ones. It also means the headline figure understates how secular the rising Spain really is, because the national average is held up by its oldest, most religious citizens rather than reflecting the young. As ever, the national average conceals two very different countries living side by side, one young and secular, the other old and still attached to the Church.

Spain's Non-Religious Share in European Perspective

Against the rest of Europe, Spain is now a middling case rather than an outlier. At about 41% non-religious it sits well below the most secular societies, such as Czechia, where a large majority claim no religion, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, but clearly above more religious countries like Italy and, especially, Poland. Among historically Catholic nations, Spain has become one of the faster-secularising, closer to France than to Portugal or Poland, a position we set in its regional frame in our religion in Europe analysis. What marks Spain out is less its current level than the speed of its journey: a country that was almost entirely Catholic within living memory has caught up with much of western Europe in barely four decades, a pace of change few of its neighbours have matched. That speed is the single most remarkable feature of the Spanish case, and it is what makes the country such a closely studied example of rapid secularisation in the academic literature.

Spain's path also complicates the old assumption that Catholic countries secularise more slowly than Protestant ones. France, Belgium and increasingly Spain show that historically Catholic societies can shed religious belief just as fast once the social and political props of the Church are removed. In Spain the trigger was the rapid modernisation that followed the transition to democracy, which compressed into a few decades changes that unfolded over a century elsewhere. The result is a secular transition that was both unusually late in starting and unusually quick in running its course.

The comparison also points to where Spain may be heading. The most secular European countries show that non-religious shares can rise well beyond half the population, so Spain's 41% is unlikely to be a ceiling. Northern and central European patterns, including the large non-religious populations charted in our religion in England and Wales analysis, suggest that once secularisation gathers pace it tends to keep going for decades. With Spain's young already majority non-religious and each new cohort more secular than the last, the country looks set to move steadily up the European table. Whether it eventually joins the most secular group will depend on how far the generational shift runs and whether the tentative signs of stabilisation among the very youngest prove durable. Until that question is settled, the safest assumption is that the upward trend has further to run, since nothing in the age, gender or generational data points to a natural ceiling anywhere near the current level.

The Rise of Atheism in Spain

Perhaps the most striking single trend is the surge in outright atheism. The share of Spaniards describing themselves as atheists has risen from about 3.5% in 2000 to roughly 17% by 2026, a near-fivefold increase that has outpaced the growth of the vaguer non-religious categories. This matters because atheism is a firmer, more considered position than mere indifference or lapsing, and it tends to be stickier across the life course. The trend is sharpest among the young and the educated, and it represents a genuine shift in worldview rather than just a decline in churchgoing of the kind documented in our weekly church attendance in Italy analysis. Where earlier generations who drifted from the Church often kept a residual belief in God, a growing share of younger Spaniards now reject the idea altogether, which makes the change harder to reverse. This generational hardening of unbelief is precisely why most demographers expect the secular share to keep rising even if the headline figure pauses for a year or two.

Non-Religious Spain by Gender

Non-belief in Spain is also gendered. Around 46% of men describe themselves as non-religious, against roughly 36% of women, a gap of about ten points that appears across every age group. The most secular group of all is young men, among whom around two-thirds claim no religion, while older women remain the most religious. The reasons behind the gender gap are debated, ranging from differences in socialisation and caregiving roles to distinct attitudes toward meaning and mortality, but the pattern is consistent across Europe. Combined with the age effect, it means the non-religious population skews young and male, while the shrinking religious core skews old and female. This mirror-image profile has practical consequences for everything from family religious transmission to the future composition of both churches and secular civil society in Spain. For the Church in particular, the challenge is not only the shrinking of its flock but its ageing and feminisation, which together point to a far smaller and older active membership within a couple of decades.

Place and education sharpen these gender lines still further. Non-belief is most common among the urban, the university-educated and the young, and least common in small towns, among older people and those with less formal schooling. A young, city-dwelling graduate and an elderly, small-town pensioner can hold almost opposite worldviews, sometimes within the same family. These overlapping divides are why a single national percentage can feel misleading, and why the lived experience of religion, or its absence, varies so widely from one Spaniard to the next. The same headline figure can describe a devout rural majority and a thoroughly secular urban one, which is why the national average so often satisfies no one and conceals as much as it reveals.

Non-Religious Share by Generation

Grouped by generation, the divide is stark. About 61% of Generation Z are non-religious, against roughly 52% of Millennials, 40% of Generation X, 28% of Boomers and just 20% of the Silent Generation. Each younger generation is markedly more secular than the one before, a textbook cohort gradient. Because religious affiliation appears to be largely set in early adulthood and to change only slowly afterwards, these generational differences tend to persist as cohorts age, much as migration-driven religious patterns persist in the communities described in our Muslim residents in Italy analysis. As the most religious older generations pass on and Generation Z and its successors make up a growing share of adults, the national non-religious figure is set to keep climbing for decades, barring a genuine and sustained religious revival among the young. The arithmetic is stark: as the most religious generations are steadily replaced by the least religious ones, the national figure has little choice but to follow the young downward over time.

Non-Religious Spain 1980-2026: The Key Numbers

Set against the milestones, the scale of the shift is hard to overstate. The non-religious share stood at about 8.5% in 1980, around 12.5% by 2000, roughly 22% by 2010 and some 41% by 2026, almost a fivefold rise across the period. Atheists alone have grown from a tiny minority to about 17% of the population, agnostics to 13% and the indifferent to 11%. The non-religious are now a clear majority among the young, a majority among men under 35, and the second-largest religious identity nationally. The same demographic forces of education, urbanisation and generational turnover that drive this shift are reshaping populations worldwide, as our world population analysis makes clear, and in Spain they have produced one of the fastest secular transitions anywhere in southern Europe. Few European countries have travelled so far so fast, and fewer still began the journey from so devout a starting point, which is what makes Spain such a vivid case study in modern religious change.

Taken together, the data describes a country in the middle of a profound and accelerating secular transition. A non-religious minority that was negligible in 1980 has grown into the defining feature of young Spanish life, and on current trends it will rival or overtake the religious majority within a generation. For researchers, faith organisations and policymakers, the lesson is to track the youngest cohorts and the rise of atheism as leading indicators, rather than the slower-moving national headline that the oldest, most religious Spaniards still prop up. The line that began creeping upward in the 1980s has become the central fact of religion in Spain, and every signal in this report suggests it has not yet finished climbing. What began as a barely visible minority in the Spain of the early 1980s has become the defining religious fact of the country's young, and on every measure examined here the line is still pointing upward rather than levelling off.

Frequently Asked Questions: Non-Religious Spain