Updates

The 2020 round of census data collection triggered a major revision of people groups and their religions in many countries, with a particular focus on migrant peoples. Together with a revised assessment of Christians in China, the estimate of the percentage of Christians in 2025 has declined to 30.9% (2.5b) from 32.2% (2.6b) in the previous update.

These data are also the basis of a forthcoming report on changes to the method of estimating and reporting gospel access.

The latest edition of the annual Status of Global Christianity, 2026, table from the International Bulletin of Mission Research is available in the FAQ section.

Also in the FAQ, the glossary has been trimmed to include the terms most directly relevant to the database, and the methodology document has similarly been streamlined.

Core data remains the same except that the "percentage of people who know Christians" fields have been changed in the country table, to better reflect the likely margin of error, from a single percentage to a range and those same fields have been removed from the peoples table.