Hey Alex!!! Been too long since we chatted. I have been watching your content for a bit now. I was wondering if you could site your numbers with links if possible. My in laws believe church membership in the US rose by 16% last year but I have been following your statistical posts and think your numbers connect more. I know you say you reference numbers the church shares so I am hoping to get membership numbers from the church to share with them.
For data in years past, we have to be creative and use tools like the wayback machine which saves snapshots of websites every few weeks. So we can see the tallies of years past if that makes sense. For 2024 (released April of 2025), the number is 6,929,956 which can be accessed here on the way back machine:
So its the first time we've seen a decrease, but it's only a very slight decrease of a few hundred.
The data on the dashboard is accessed programmatically using the wayback machine from the first date the data is available online in 2011 to the most recent on the current website (2025).
Thanks for this excellent analysis! You mention that congregational decline is usually a leading indicator of membership decline which I thought was interesting. Why is that the case? I would have thought the opposite to be true (i.e. membership decline first, and then congregational decline follows).
Yeah your intuition is right when thinking about active participating membership; however, I'm talking about the relationship between official church records and congregations. Because when the majority of people leave, they do no remove their records and can stay on them for many years (which creates a lagging effect until they are eventually removed vs/ congregations which must have X priesthood holders in the present day). From what I've seen, the lagging effect shows quicker than you may think and my hypothesis for that is convert baptisms in a region are often correlated with the size of the membership base and if a membership base is decreasing, they may see more immediate drops in convert baptisms and will see immediate drops in births.
I think I saw data in Twitter that said this is all due to child of record numbers dumping because of child birth rates? Is that true? Conversion baptisms are really rising, but birth rates are dumping.
We don't have visibility from official numbers into births vs. baptisms on a country basis, but globally this is the trend and it is likely the case in the US as well.
From a US perspective, I think anyone can look at their own ward to witness this fact (i.e., The Old folks in the ward had more kids than younger people are having today). But the compounding effect is what is harder to understand from just looking around the pews.
So look at the math:
Using Pew Research numbers and figures pulled from a Religion News article (below), you can see how it impacts the "organic" growth within the church. Our "active member" average fertility rate has gone from 3.31 in the 80s to 2.42 today. 0.9 might not seem huge, but look at it over generations and you see how much it impacts.
For example, let's take 100 families. If each family averages 3.3 children, and those children grow up, pair off, and form their own families of 3.3 kids, here's what happens across generations:
I think we're feeling that impact play out: 60% fewer families - just based on birth rates; Convert baptisms cannot plug that gap.
If we wanted to "make up" this drop with convert baptisms, we'd need 154 converts equivalent in that first generation, and additional increases each generation. And that is just being very simplistic, assuming consistent retention, matched birth rates, etc.
Ultimately, for every 1 average family that existed with 3.3 kids in 1980 - the Church needs to find, baptize, and retain 6 convert families over four generations to replace the organic growth that is lost only through the birth rate decline. This is a HUGE number, no matter what other factors are at play.
Sorry to blow up your casual comment with a math essay - haha. But it's a really interesting topic for me and something that I've looked at previously to try to understand.
What are the odds that the DC increase from 2024 to 2025 is LdS republicans moving to DC to work in a new Republican led executive branch (and its associated business opportunities)
Is there any way to tease out the urban vs. rural rates?
In our (urban) congregation, we’re seeing lots of growth. Is that happening elsewhere?
Also, I don’t think you say so, but it seems possible that some of the state by state changes could be due to people moving between states — Californians to Texas, for example.
I probably sound like a broken record in my comments, but across the US the only religious groups that are growing in durable ways are those that make technology decisions (e.g. what phones/apps/websites are appropriate for members to use) as communities, rather than as individuals.
So far I've seen zero exceptions to this rule. When I say "durable" I mean growth that's not based on cannibalizing other groups.
Right. Also Old Order Mennonites, Bruderhof, Orthodox Jews, and some other smaller groups. It's the defining trend of our era, though the fact that these groups keep to themselves means that the rest of us tend not to notice.
I've been waiting for one of the otherwise high-tension groups (LDS, Jehovah's Witnesses, SDA, etc... ) to notice this and try making tech decisions communally, but so far that hasn't happened to my knowledge.
If you know of anyone in the LDS experimenting with this I'd be interested to know.
LDS messaging on social media has been a little schizophrenic, in my opinion. Early on a warning, then what seemed like a full throated endorsement of getting on social media to share inspirational messages to bring light to the world and enhance church PR, then a call for a social media fast, etc. I expect the messaging to stabilize and moderate over coming years, but I don’t expect anything like a ban. I’m also not aware of any meaningful LDS subcultures cracking down on technology. We may not be of the world but we enjoy being in the world.
Does the LDS have the ability to experiment: to encourage individual congregations to try things that the body at a whole isn't endorsing yet?
That's perhaps an even-deeper trait of the groups I mentioned: the ability to try things and learn.
As of this moment social media use (while sometimes resulting in short term growth) seems likely to be incompatible with long-term health. It's like eating your seed corn. Social media evangelism seems like the equivalent of handing out tracts with the cocaine you're selling.
The Church does a lot of field trials of various programs and structures in individual stakes. They could in principle, but I think a social media ban would be hard to roll out and enforce as a field test in one stake. The Church usually doesn’t take a strong stand on cultural issues that are not directly moral, so it would be going against the grain. But President Oaks has a bit of a different temperament than Presidents Nelson or Monson when it comes to image and PR, so we may get surprises - but I wouldn’t bet on it.
I don't whether the BOM has support for this, but using the Bible it's pretty easy to make the argument that faith is attention. In that sense it's even more central than moral issues.
In mainstream church circles which lack any ability to resist individualism I can see why this would be a nonstarter. But the LDS has some demonstrated ability to resist.
I think I saw data in Twitter that said this is all due to child of record numbers dumping because of child birth rates? Is that true? Conversion baptisms are really rising, but birth rates are dumping.
Hey Alex!!! Been too long since we chatted. I have been watching your content for a bit now. I was wondering if you could site your numbers with links if possible. My in laws believe church membership in the US rose by 16% last year but I have been following your statistical posts and think your numbers connect more. I know you say you reference numbers the church shares so I am hoping to get membership numbers from the church to share with them.
Hey Caleb! Hope you're doing well. Haha ya it's been a bit.
For your question, on the church website they keep the current yearly tally of 6,929,770 members which they update every April.
You can find this years US numbers here for 2025: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/learn/facts-statistics/united-states-of-america?lang=eng
For data in years past, we have to be creative and use tools like the wayback machine which saves snapshots of websites every few weeks. So we can see the tallies of years past if that makes sense. For 2024 (released April of 2025), the number is 6,929,956 which can be accessed here on the way back machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20250504142134/https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/facts-and-statistics/country/united-states
So its the first time we've seen a decrease, but it's only a very slight decrease of a few hundred.
The data on the dashboard is accessed programmatically using the wayback machine from the first date the data is available online in 2011 to the most recent on the current website (2025).
Thank you so much!
Thanks for this excellent analysis! You mention that congregational decline is usually a leading indicator of membership decline which I thought was interesting. Why is that the case? I would have thought the opposite to be true (i.e. membership decline first, and then congregational decline follows).
Yeah your intuition is right when thinking about active participating membership; however, I'm talking about the relationship between official church records and congregations. Because when the majority of people leave, they do no remove their records and can stay on them for many years (which creates a lagging effect until they are eventually removed vs/ congregations which must have X priesthood holders in the present day). From what I've seen, the lagging effect shows quicker than you may think and my hypothesis for that is convert baptisms in a region are often correlated with the size of the membership base and if a membership base is decreasing, they may see more immediate drops in convert baptisms and will see immediate drops in births.
I think I saw data in Twitter that said this is all due to child of record numbers dumping because of child birth rates? Is that true? Conversion baptisms are really rising, but birth rates are dumping.
We don't have visibility from official numbers into births vs. baptisms on a country basis, but globally this is the trend and it is likely the case in the US as well.
I wrote about this exact topic 2 weeks ago here: https://mormonmetrics.com/p/april-2025-general-conference-stats
From a US perspective, I think anyone can look at their own ward to witness this fact (i.e., The Old folks in the ward had more kids than younger people are having today). But the compounding effect is what is harder to understand from just looking around the pews.
So look at the math:
Using Pew Research numbers and figures pulled from a Religion News article (below), you can see how it impacts the "organic" growth within the church. Our "active member" average fertility rate has gone from 3.31 in the 80s to 2.42 today. 0.9 might not seem huge, but look at it over generations and you see how much it impacts.
For example, let's take 100 families. If each family averages 3.3 children, and those children grow up, pair off, and form their own families of 3.3 kids, here's what happens across generations:
Generation 1: 100 families (100 families*3.3 kids = 330/2 = 165)
Generation 2: 165 families
Generation 3: 272 families
Generation 4: 449 families
But run the same math at today's rate of 2.42:
Generation 1: 100 families
Generation 2: 121 families
Generation 3: 146 families
Generation 4: 177 families
---
Now do the same math across 16 million.
I think we're feeling that impact play out: 60% fewer families - just based on birth rates; Convert baptisms cannot plug that gap.
If we wanted to "make up" this drop with convert baptisms, we'd need 154 converts equivalent in that first generation, and additional increases each generation. And that is just being very simplistic, assuming consistent retention, matched birth rates, etc.
Ultimately, for every 1 average family that existed with 3.3 kids in 1980 - the Church needs to find, baptize, and retain 6 convert families over four generations to replace the organic growth that is lost only through the birth rate decline. This is a HUGE number, no matter what other factors are at play.
Sorry to blow up your casual comment with a math essay - haha. But it's a really interesting topic for me and something that I've looked at previously to try to understand.
--
https://religionnews.com/2019/06/15/the-incredible-shrinking-mormon-american-family/
What are the odds that the DC increase from 2024 to 2025 is LdS republicans moving to DC to work in a new Republican led executive branch (and its associated business opportunities)
Is there any way to tease out the urban vs. rural rates?
In our (urban) congregation, we’re seeing lots of growth. Is that happening elsewhere?
Also, I don’t think you say so, but it seems possible that some of the state by state changes could be due to people moving between states — Californians to Texas, for example.
I probably sound like a broken record in my comments, but across the US the only religious groups that are growing in durable ways are those that make technology decisions (e.g. what phones/apps/websites are appropriate for members to use) as communities, rather than as individuals.
So far I've seen zero exceptions to this rule. When I say "durable" I mean growth that's not based on cannibalizing other groups.
Which groups do this? The Amish? Others?
Right. Also Old Order Mennonites, Bruderhof, Orthodox Jews, and some other smaller groups. It's the defining trend of our era, though the fact that these groups keep to themselves means that the rest of us tend not to notice.
I've been waiting for one of the otherwise high-tension groups (LDS, Jehovah's Witnesses, SDA, etc... ) to notice this and try making tech decisions communally, but so far that hasn't happened to my knowledge.
If you know of anyone in the LDS experimenting with this I'd be interested to know.
LDS messaging on social media has been a little schizophrenic, in my opinion. Early on a warning, then what seemed like a full throated endorsement of getting on social media to share inspirational messages to bring light to the world and enhance church PR, then a call for a social media fast, etc. I expect the messaging to stabilize and moderate over coming years, but I don’t expect anything like a ban. I’m also not aware of any meaningful LDS subcultures cracking down on technology. We may not be of the world but we enjoy being in the world.
Does the LDS have the ability to experiment: to encourage individual congregations to try things that the body at a whole isn't endorsing yet?
That's perhaps an even-deeper trait of the groups I mentioned: the ability to try things and learn.
As of this moment social media use (while sometimes resulting in short term growth) seems likely to be incompatible with long-term health. It's like eating your seed corn. Social media evangelism seems like the equivalent of handing out tracts with the cocaine you're selling.
The Church does a lot of field trials of various programs and structures in individual stakes. They could in principle, but I think a social media ban would be hard to roll out and enforce as a field test in one stake. The Church usually doesn’t take a strong stand on cultural issues that are not directly moral, so it would be going against the grain. But President Oaks has a bit of a different temperament than Presidents Nelson or Monson when it comes to image and PR, so we may get surprises - but I wouldn’t bet on it.
I don't whether the BOM has support for this, but using the Bible it's pretty easy to make the argument that faith is attention. In that sense it's even more central than moral issues.
In mainstream church circles which lack any ability to resist individualism I can see why this would be a nonstarter. But the LDS has some demonstrated ability to resist.
I think I saw data in Twitter that said this is all due to child of record numbers dumping because of child birth rates? Is that true? Conversion baptisms are really rising, but birth rates are dumping.