How Many People Follow Each of the World Major Religions?

Christians, Muslims and the religiously unaffiliated account for almost four in five people

Christianity remains the largest religion in the world. According to the most recent global census of religion, published by the Pew Research Center in June 2025 with 2020 as its reference year, there were about 2.27 billion Christians, or 28.8 percent of the world population. Muslims were the second largest group with about 2.02 billion people (25.6 percent), followed by the religiously unaffiliated, people who describe themselves as atheist, agnostic or of no particular religion, with about 1.91 billion (24.2 percent).

Hindus were the fourth largest group at nearly 1.2 billion people, or 14.9 percent. Far behind came Buddhists with 324 million (4.1 percent), followers of other religions such as Sikhism, Daoism, Jainism, the Bahai faith and traditional folk religions with 2.2 percent, and Jews with 14.8 million (about 0.2 percent). In total, 75.8 percent of the world population identified with a religion in 2020, slightly less than the 76.7 percent recorded in 2010.

Three groups dominate: Christians, Muslims and the religiously unaffiliated together make up 78.6 percent of humanity; Hindus add another 14.9 percent.

The ranking has one important change compared with older lists. Because Pew now counts most of the population of China as religiously unaffiliated, the unaffiliated are the third largest group in the world, ahead of Hindus. The gap between the top three is also narrower than many readers expect: Christians lead Muslims by about 246 million people, and Muslims lead the unaffiliated by about 117 million. For a country level view of the second largest group, see our ranking of the countries with the largest Muslim population, which uses the same Pew dataset.

All seven groups: size, share and change between 2010 and 2020

The table brings the main Pew indicators together. Population counts are for people of all ages in 2020. The share columns compare 2010 and 2020, and the change columns show how many people each group gained or lost over the decade. Median age, from the same report, explains much of the difference in growth: younger groups have more people entering the childbearing years.

Counts for Christians, Muslims and the unaffiliated are from the Pew report tables (2,268.86 million, 2,022.59 million and 1,905.36 million in 2020). Hindu, Buddhist and Jewish counts are as rounded in the report text. The Buddhist percentage change is a BusinessStats calculation from the reported 19 million decline. Pew does not state a separate count for other religions; 2.2 percent of the world population is roughly 170 million people.

Two numbers stand out. Muslims grew by 20.7 percent in ten years, about 1.7 times as fast as the world population as a whole, and their absolute gain of 347 million was larger than the combined growth of every other religion. At the other end, Buddhists were the only major group to shrink in absolute numbers. Hindus grew at almost exactly the pace of the world population, so their share barely moved.

How Pew counts 8 billion people by religion, and why other totals differ

No single organisation asks every person on Earth about religion, so global totals are always estimates assembled from national sources. The Pew Research Center study behind this page combined more than 2,700 censuses, demographic surveys, population registers and general population surveys covering 201 countries and territories with at least 100,000 inhabitants, which together hold 99.98 percent of the world population. Country populations were taken from the United Nations World Population Prospects 2024.

The measure is self identification. A person counts as a Christian, Muslim or Hindu if he or she, or a parent answering for a child, names that religion, regardless of how often they pray or attend services. People who answer atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular are counted as religiously unaffiliated, even though many of them hold some religious beliefs or take part in rituals. This matters most in East Asia, where folk practices and ancestor veneration are common among people who do not claim a religious identity.

These rules explain why other totals appear online. Lists that put Buddhists near 500 million usually rely on the 2015 baseline, which showed 488 million in 2010, or on broader definitions that count everyone who takes part in Buddhist rites. Lists that show the unaffiliated at around 1.1 to 1.2 billion use the same outdated baseline. This page uses one consistent dataset for all 2010 and 2020 figures and names any other source next to the number it supports. For the size of the total population behind these shares, see our world population statistics.

Muslims added 347 million people in ten years, more than all other religions combined

Between 2010 and 2020 the world population grew by about 12 percent, or roughly 860 million people by a BusinessStats estimate derived from the Pew counts and shares. How that growth was shared out depended on where each religious group lives and how old its members are. Muslims, concentrated in young and fast growing populations in South Asia, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, gained the most. The religiously unaffiliated came second, which surprised many observers because their low fertility had led earlier models to expect slow growth.

Muslims gained the most: their 347 million increase was nearly three times the gain of Christians, while Buddhists lost 19 million people.

Christians grew by 122 million, but this was slower than the roughly 12 percent growth of the world population over the decade, so their share fell by 1.8 percentage points. Hindus grew by 126 million, matching world population growth, and their share was steady. The unaffiliated grew by 270 million, mainly because of religious switching: many adults raised as Christians or Buddhists stopped identifying with any religion. The decline of Buddhism is a combination of switching, low fertility and the age profile of Buddhist populations in Japan, South Korea, Thailand and China.

Christian share down 1.8 points, Muslim share up 1.8 points

A near mirror image: the Christian share fell from 30.6 to 28.8 percent while the Muslim share rose from 23.9 to 25.6 percent.

If the trends of the 2010s continued at the same pace, the gap between Christians and Muslims would keep narrowing by about 3.6 percentage points per decade. That simple extrapolation should not be read as a forecast, because fertility in many Muslim majority countries is falling and switching patterns change over time. It does show why demographers expect the two largest religions to approach parity in the second half of this century, a point discussed in the projections section below.

Sub-Saharan Africa has overtaken Europe as the home of the most Christians

The most significant geographic shift of the decade happened inside Christianity. In 2020 about 697 million Christians lived in sub-Saharan Africa, up 31 percent since 2010, while the number in Europe fell 9 percent to 505 million. As a result, sub-Saharan Africa held 30.7 percent of the world Christian population, compared with 24.1 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean, 22.3 percent in Europe, 11.8 percent in the Asia-Pacific region, 10.5 percent in North America and 0.6 percent in the Middle East and North Africa. At the start of the 20th century, Pew notes, Europe held about two thirds of all Christians and sub-Saharan Africa about 1 percent.

North America saw the steepest fall: the Christian share dropped 14.3 points to 62.9 percent, compared with 7.5 points in Europe and 5.5 points in Latin America.

Sub-Saharan Africa was the only region where the Christian share of the population rose, if only slightly, from 61.7 to 62.0 percent. Everywhere else it fell. Christians remained a majority in Latin America and the Caribbean (84.6 percent), Europe (67.1 percent) and North America (62.9 percent), but in all three regions the decline was driven by adults who left Christianity, mostly to become unaffiliated. The United States still has more Christians than any other country, about one tenth of the global total, even though their share of the American population fell from 78.3 percent in 2010 to 64.0 percent in 2020.

The number of Christian majority countries also fell, from 124 in 2010 to 120 in 2020. The United Kingdom (49.4 percent Christian), Australia (46.8 percent), France (46.5 percent) and Uruguay (44.5 percent) dropped below the 50 percent mark. For the detail behind the European shift, our analysis of religion in Europe covers the continent country by country, and national pages track the trend in the Catholic population of Germany and religious affiliation in Poland.

Catholic Church statistics give a separate, larger count

Church records offer a second view of the largest Christian tradition. The Annuario Pontificio 2026 and the Statistical Yearbook of the Church report just over 1.422 billion baptised Catholics at the end of 2024, up 1.14 percent from about 1.406 billion a year earlier and equal to about 17.8 percent of the world population. The Americas account for 47.7 percent of Catholics, Africa for 20.3 percent, Europe for 20.1 percent, Asia for 11.0 percent and Oceania for 0.9 percent. Because these are baptismal records rather than survey answers, they include people who were baptised as children but no longer identify as Catholic, so they are not directly comparable with the Pew totals.

Islam is the fastest growing major religion because Muslims are the youngest group

The Muslim population grew from about 1.68 billion in 2010 to 2.02 billion in 2020. Pew attributes this mainly to natural increase: in 2020, 33 percent of Muslims were under the age of 15 and their median age was 24.1 years, more than six years below the world median of 30.6. Religious switching played only a minor role. Slightly more people became Muslim than left Islam, but switching in and out of Islam is uncommon, so it had little effect on the total.

Geographically, 58.7 percent of Muslims live in the Asia-Pacific region, 20.5 percent in the Middle East and North Africa and 18.2 percent in sub-Saharan Africa, with only 2.2 percent in Europe and 0.3 percent in North America. Muslims form 94.2 percent of the population of the Middle East and North Africa and 32.8 percent of sub-Saharan Africa. The country ranking, census checks and growth by country are covered in depth on our page about the largest Muslim populations by country, so this page does not repeat them.

The religiously unaffiliated grew fastest in the Americas and Europe

The religiously unaffiliated numbered 1.91 billion in 2020, up 270 million or 16.5 percent since 2010. Most of them live in a single country: China had about 1.3 billion unaffiliated people, 90 percent of its population and 67 percent of the global total. The United States had about 101 million, up 97 percent in ten years and 30 percent of its population, making it the country with the second largest unaffiliated population ahead of Japan with 73 million. The size of the Chinese population behind that figure is covered in our page on the total population of China.

Nearly doubled in North America: the unaffiliated population rose 92.3 percent to 114 million, while in Asia-Pacific it grew only 9.5 percent.

In relative terms, growth was strongest where the unaffiliated started from a lower base and where young adults were leaving Christianity in large numbers. North America almost doubled its unaffiliated population. Latin America and the Caribbean grew by two thirds, to 77 million people, and Europe by more than a third, to 190 million. In Asia-Pacific, which holds 78 percent of all unaffiliated people, growth of 9.5 percent was well below the global rate of 16.5 percent.

Australia, Chile and Uruguay moved most: each added more than 16 points to its unaffiliated share in a single decade.

Pew found that the unaffiliated share rose by at least 5 percentage points in 35 countries. In ten countries and territories the unaffiliated now form a majority, up from seven in 2010: China, North Korea, the Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Macao and Japan were joined by the Netherlands (54.1 percent), Uruguay (52.4 percent) and New Zealand (51.4 percent). In Western Europe the trend is visible in national statistics on non-religious people in Spain, religion in the Netherlands and Church of Sweden membership.

Hindus are concentrated in India; Buddhists are the only major group in decline

The global Hindu population grew 12 percent between 2010 and 2020, from a little under 1.1 billion to nearly 1.2 billion. No other major religion is as geographically concentrated: 99 percent of Hindus live in the Asia-Pacific region and 95 percent in India alone, where Hindus made up 79.4 percent of the population in 2020 by the Pew estimate. Nepal (81.2 percent) is the only other Hindu majority country. Outside South Asia the largest Hindu communities are in the United States (3.0 million), the United Kingdom (1.1 million) and the United Arab Emirates (1.1 million).

Migration is reshaping these smaller communities. The number of Hindus in the Middle East and North Africa rose 62 percent to 3.2 million, mainly because of migration, while the number in North America rose 55 percent to 3.6 million and in Europe 30 percent to 2.2 million. The last Indian census with religion data, from 2011, counted 966.3 million Hindus, 79.8 percent of the population, close to the Pew figure for 2020; the next census has a reference date of 1 March 2027.

Buddhism followed the opposite path. The number of Buddhists fell by 19 million to 324 million, and their share of the world population dropped from 4.9 to 4.1 percent. Three forces combined. Buddhist majority societies such as Japan, South Korea and Thailand have some of the lowest fertility rates in the world, with a median Buddhist age of 39.8 years in 2020, the oldest of any group. Switching also worked against Buddhism, with 1.8 adults leaving for every one who joined in the countries surveyed. South Korea saw the largest fall in a Buddhist share, down 6.6 points to 19.0 percent, while the unaffiliated rose to 48.3 percent.

The seven Buddhist majority countries, led by Thailand (94.4 percent Buddhist in 2020), hold 47 percent of the world Buddhist population. Measuring Buddhism is especially difficult in China and Japan, where many people visit temples and observe Buddhist rites without naming Buddhism as their religion. In Japan, Pew counted 37.2 percent of the population as Buddhist and 57.5 percent as unaffiliated in 2020.

Jews number 14.8 million and Israel is now home to the largest share

The global Jewish population grew by nearly 1 million between 2010 and 2020 to 14.8 million, keeping its share at about 0.2 percent of the world population. The balance between the two main centres shifted during the decade. In 2020, 45.9 percent of Jews lived in the Middle East and North Africa, almost entirely in Israel, and 41.2 percent in North America, reversing the order of 2010. The Jewish population of Israel rose from 5.8 million to 6.8 million, and Israel is the only Jewish majority country, with 77.0 percent of its population Jewish in 2020.

Jews are among the oldest religious groups by age profile, with a median age of 38.2 years in 2020, second only to Buddhists. In the 2015 Pew projections, Jewish fertility averaged 2.3 children per woman in 2010 to 2015, slightly below the world average of 2.5. Growth in Israel accounted for all of the net increase in the global Jewish population during the decade, as the rise of 1.0 million in Israel matched the total gain of nearly 1 million.

The category of other religions, 2.2 percent of the world population in both 2010 and 2020, gathers a wide range of traditions. It includes Sikhism, with 20.8 million followers in India at the 2011 census, Jainism with 4.5 million in the same census, Daoism and Chinese folk religion, Shinto, the Bahai faith, Zoroastrianism and traditional African and Indigenous religions. Taiwan is the only place where followers of other religions form a majority, at 51.7 percent of the population in 2020. About 65 percent of this group lives in the Asia-Pacific region.

Religious makeup of the six world regions in 2020

The regional table shows how unevenly religions are spread. Asia-Pacific, home to nearly 60 percent of the world population, is also the most mixed region, with large unaffiliated, Muslim and Hindu populations. The Middle East and North Africa is the most homogeneous, at 94.2 percent Muslim. Latin America remains the most Christian region despite the losses of the past decade.

Source: Pew Research Center, Religious Diversity Around the World, Appendix C (February 2026), 2020 rows. Rows may not add to exactly 100 because of rounding.

Read across the columns and a second pattern appears. Sub-Saharan Africa, with 14.3 percent of the world population in 2020 and a rising share, is now central to the future of both Christianity and Islam. North America and Europe, by contrast, now have unaffiliated shares of 30.2 and 25.3 percent, close to the Asia-Pacific level. Our religion topic overview collects all national religion datasets published on BusinessStats.

A 15 year age gap between Muslims and Buddhists drives future growth

Age is the single best predictor of how a religious group will grow. A young group has many people entering their childbearing years and relatively few deaths; an older group has the reverse. In 2020 the median Muslim was 24.1 years old and the median Buddhist 39.8, a gap of more than 15 years. Christians, at 30.8 years, were the closest to the world median of 30.6.

Muslims are the youngest group: a median age of 24.1 years, compared with 39.8 for Buddhists and 36.8 for the religiously unaffiliated.

Fertility points in the same direction. The most recent fertility rates by religion published by Pew come from its 2015 projections report and cover the years 2010 to 2015. They are older than the 2020 population figures but remain the standard reference for the differences between groups.

Source: Pew Research Center, The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050 (2 April 2015). The 2015 report used a separate folk religions category that the 2025 report merges into other religions.

Only Muslims and Christians had fertility clearly above the world average in 2010 to 2015. The unaffiliated, at 1.7 children per woman, would shrink over time without switching; their growth in the 2010s came from people leaving religion rather than from births. Global fertility has fallen since those estimates were made, so the gaps may have narrowed, but no newer worldwide breakdown by religion has been published. The broader male and female structure of the world population is covered in our page on the global population by gender.

For every adult who joined a religion, 3.2 left one

Religious switching means changing from the religion in which a person was raised to another religion or to no religion. Pew measured it with surveys in 117 countries and territories that are home to 92 percent of the world population aged 18 to 54. Across those countries, 3.2 adults left their childhood religion for every 1 adult raised without religion who joined one. Christianity lost the most: 3.1 adults left for every 1 who joined. Buddhism lost 1.8 for every 1 who joined. Hindus saw slightly more people leave than join, while Islam gained slightly, but switching is rare in both cases.

Switching is the main reason the observed 2020 numbers differ from what Pew projected in 2015. That model expected the unaffiliated share of the world population to fall from 16.4 percent in 2010 to 13.2 percent in 2050, because the unaffiliated have few children. Instead, using the revised baseline, the unaffiliated share rose from 23.3 to 24.2 percent between 2010 and 2020, as millions of adults in the Americas, Europe and East Asia disaffiliated.

Christians form the majority in 120 of 201 countries and territories

Counting countries rather than people gives a different picture. In 2020, Christians were a majority in 120 of the 201 countries and territories in the Pew study, down from 124 in 2010. Muslims were a majority in 53, unchanged over the decade. The unaffiliated were a majority in 10, Buddhists in 7, Hindus in 2 (India and Nepal), and Jews and followers of other religions in 1 each (Israel and Taiwan). In 7 places no group reached 50 percent.

Christian majorities are the most widespread: 120 countries and territories, 60 percent of all places studied, compared with 53 Muslim majority countries.

About 80 percent of people worldwide live in a country where their own religious group is the majority. The figure is highest for Hindus, 97 percent of whom live in India or Nepal, and about 8 in 10 for Muslims, Christians and the unaffiliated. Fewer than half of Buddhists and Jews live in a country where they are the majority. The 7 places with no majority group include the United Kingdom, Australia, France and Singapore.

Asia-Pacific is the most religiously diverse region, the Middle East the least

In February 2026 Pew added a Religious Diversity Index to its 2020 data. The index runs from 0, for a country made up entirely of one religious group, to 10, for an even split across the seven categories. Singapore was the most religiously diverse country in the world with a score of 9.3, followed by Suriname. Taiwan, South Korea (7.3), Australia, Mauritius, Guinea-Bissau, Togo, Benin and France (6.9) completed the top ten. Yemen, Afghanistan and Somalia, each at least 99.8 percent Muslim, were the least diverse.

Asia-Pacific scores 8.7: no other region mixes such large unaffiliated, Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist populations; the Middle East and North Africa scores only 1.3.

The United States scored 5.8 and ranked 32nd, but it was the most diverse of the ten most populous countries, ahead of Nigeria, Russia, India and Brazil; Pakistan was the least diverse of the ten at 0.8. Most countries changed little between 2010 and 2020: 153 of the 201 places moved by less than half a point, while 25 rose by at least 1 point. Among them was the United States, which moved from the moderate to the high diversity level as its Christian share fell to 64 percent.

What newer censuses and surveys show after the 2020 reference year

The Pew estimates stop in 2020, but several national statistics offices and survey programmes have published newer data. They confirm the direction of the Pew findings in Western countries, with one notable exception: in the United States the decline of Christianity appears to have slowed. The figures below are national counts with their own years and methods and are not part of the global dataset.

Sources: Office for National Statistics (29 November 2022); Australian Bureau of Statistics (28 June 2022); Statistics Canada (26 October 2022); Pew Research Center (26 February 2025). Census questions differ by country, and the US study covers adults only.

For the first time in a census of England and Wales, fewer than half of residents described themselves as Christian; Muslims rose to 6.5 percent, or 3.9 million people. The detailed results by religion are on our page on the number of religious people in England and Wales. Australia and Canada recorded similar shifts, with the no religion share rising by roughly 9 to 11 points in five to ten years.

The slide has slowed: the Christian share fell 7 points between 2007 and 2014 and 9 points over the following decade, but Pew finds it has been relatively stable since about 2019.

In the 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study, 62 percent of American adults identified as Christian, including 40 percent Protestant and 19 percent Catholic, and 29 percent as religiously unaffiliated. Pew concluded that the long decline of Christianity in the United States has slowed and may have levelled off since about 2019. For the population base behind these shares, see our US population statistics.

Pew projections from 2015: Muslims nearly level with Christians by 2050

The most widely cited long term outlook remains the Pew Research Center report The Future of World Religions, published in April 2015. Its model, based on a 2010 baseline, projected that the number of Muslims would grow by 73 percent to 2.76 billion by 2050, compared with growth of 35 percent for Christians to 2.92 billion. On those numbers, Muslims would make up 29.7 percent of the world population in 2050 and Christians 31.4 percent. Extending the model, Pew expected the two groups to reach roughly equal shares, about 32 percent each, around 2070, with Muslims more numerous afterwards.

A projection, not a forecast of record: the 2015 model expected Muslims to grow by 1.16 billion and Christians by 750 million between 2010 and 2050.

Two lessons from the 2020 data suggest caution. First, the unaffiliated grew much faster than the 2015 model assumed, because switching away from religion accelerated in the Americas, Europe and parts of Asia. The model projected only 99 million additional unaffiliated people over four decades, while the revised data show a gain of 270 million in the 2010s alone. Second, fertility has continued to decline in many countries since 2015, which affects every group in the model and could change the pace at which Islam and Christianity converge.

What is not in doubt is the direction of the geographic shift. Between 2010 and 2020 the share of the world population living in sub-Saharan Africa rose by 2 points to 14.3 percent and the share in the Middle East and North Africa rose to 5.6 percent, while every other region declined. Both regions are among the most religious in the world. Pew stated in June 2025 that new projections beyond 2020 are not yet available, so any 2030 or 2050 figure in circulation today should be checked against its date and baseline. Updated demographic context for these regions is available in our demographics topic overview.

World religions in eight numbers

Questions about world religions by population