Our World
in Data
Oxford Martin School logoUniversity of Oxford logoGlobal Change Data Lab logo
Data

What is the most common religious affiliation in each country?

See all data and research on:
Religion

What you should know about this indicator

  • These estimates are sourced from more than 2,700 censuses and surveys.
  • People are categorized based on how they describe their own religious identity. If someone identifies with a religious group, they're classified as being part of that group regardless of their practices or beliefs.
  • The religiously unaffiliated population includes people who say they do not identify with any religion or that they are atheist or agnostic in surveys and censuses.
  • Some people categorised as “non-religious” or “religiously unaffiliated” may engage in activities and hold beliefs that can be considered religious or spiritual, even though they don't describe themselves as belonging to any religion. This is particularly important for Chinese data, since “religiously unaffiliated” is by far the largest group. Pew discusses this in detail.
  • While censuses often provide information on people of all ages, most surveys only report on the religious composition of adults. In such cases, researchers use indirect demographic methods to estimate this data for children. For example, Pew uses data on the age structure and fertility rates of women in different religious groups to estimate the proportion of each religious group in the child population. This assumes that children share their mother's religion.
  • Pew's methodology has changed over time, as improved data sources have become available. That means its latest estimates for 2010 — shown in this dataset — may differ from its earlier publications. You can see these changes and the reasons for these revisions in its updated methodology.
What is the most common religious affiliation in each country?
The most popular religion in each country and year, based on share of population.
Source
Pew Research Center (2025) – processed by Our World in Data
Last updated
October 31, 2025
Next expected update
October 2026
Date range
2010–2020

Related research and writing

Featured image

Religion

Hannah Ritchie, Lucas Rodés-Guirao, Pablo Arriagada, and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina

Explore charts that include this data

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

Pew Research Center – Global Religious Composition Estimates for 2010 and 2020

This dataset provides estimates of the number of people of all ages in seven categories: Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, people who belong to other religions, and those who are religiously unaffiliated.

The “other religions” category includes Baha’is, Daoists (also spelled Taoists), Jains, Shintoists, Sikhs, Wiccans, Zoroastrians and many small groups, some of which can be described as folk or traditional religions. The religiously unaffiliated category – sometimes called “nones” – consists of people who do not identify with any religion.

This analysis is based on more than 2,700 sources of data, including national censuses, large-scale demographic surveys, general population surveys and population registers. Our estimates cover 201 countries and territories that had populations of at least 100,000 people in 2010 or 2020. Collectively, these places are home to 99.98% of the world’s population. Data on country population totals and general demographic characteristics come from the 2024 revision of the United Nations’ World Population Prospects.

In most countries, it is not possible to precisely measure the number of people who identify with each religion. For reporting purposes, please use figures in the rounded counts worksheet. For example, since the rounded count worksheet has a value “<10,000” for values below 10,000, please report our estimates for these small populations as “less than 10,000.”

A worksheet of unrounded counts is also provided, which should be used with caution. For example, these figures may be appropriate for regression analyses.

Retrieved on
October 31, 2025
Retrieved from
https://www.pewresearch.org/dataset/dataset-of-global-religious-composition-estimates-for-2010-and-2020/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Hackett, Conrad, Marcin Stonawski, Yunping Tong, Stephanie Kramer and Anne Fengyan Shi. 2025. “Dataset of Global Religious Composition Estimates for 2010 and 2020.” Pew Research Center. doi: 10.58094/vhrw-k516.

This dataset provides estimates of the number of people of all ages in seven categories: Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, people who belong to other religions, and those who are religiously unaffiliated.

The “other religions” category includes Baha’is, Daoists (also spelled Taoists), Jains, Shintoists, Sikhs, Wiccans, Zoroastrians and many small groups, some of which can be described as folk or traditional religions. The religiously unaffiliated category – sometimes called “nones” – consists of people who do not identify with any religion.

This analysis is based on more than 2,700 sources of data, including national censuses, large-scale demographic surveys, general population surveys and population registers. Our estimates cover 201 countries and territories that had populations of at least 100,000 people in 2010 or 2020. Collectively, these places are home to 99.98% of the world’s population. Data on country population totals and general demographic characteristics come from the 2024 revision of the United Nations’ World Population Prospects.

In most countries, it is not possible to precisely measure the number of people who identify with each religion. For reporting purposes, please use figures in the rounded counts worksheet. For example, since the rounded count worksheet has a value “<10,000” for values below 10,000, please report our estimates for these small populations as “less than 10,000.”

A worksheet of unrounded counts is also provided, which should be used with caution. For example, these figures may be appropriate for regression analyses.

Retrieved on
October 31, 2025
Retrieved from
https://www.pewresearch.org/dataset/dataset-of-global-religious-composition-estimates-for-2010-and-2020/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Hackett, Conrad, Marcin Stonawski, Yunping Tong, Stephanie Kramer and Anne Fengyan Shi. 2025. “Dataset of Global Religious Composition Estimates for 2010 and 2020.” Pew Research Center. doi: 10.58094/vhrw-k516.

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: What is the most common religious affiliation in each country?”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Lucas Rodés-Guirao, Pablo Arriagada, and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina (2026) - “Religion”. Data adapted from Pew Research Center. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/most-common-religion.html [online resource] (archived on March 4, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Pew Research Center (2025) – processed by Our World in Data

Full citation

Pew Research Center (2025) – processed by Our World in Data. “What is the most common religious affiliation in each country?” [dataset]. Pew Research Center, “Global Religious Composition Estimates for 2010 and 2020” [original data]. Retrieved April 6, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/most-common-religion.html (archived on March 4, 2026).

Download

Quick download

Download the data shown in this chart as a ZIP file containing a CSV file, metadata in JSON format, and a README. The CSV file can be opened in Excel, Google Sheets, and other data analysis tools.

Download full data

Includes all entities and time points

Download displayed data

Includes only the entities and time points currently visible in the chart

Data API

Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.

Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/most-common-religion.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/most-common-religion.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/most-common-religion.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/most-common-religion.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/most-common-religion.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/most-common-religion.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/most-common-religion.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/most-common-religion.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear