The Atheist Counter
1,900,000,000
people worldwide have no religion
145 million people identify specifically as atheists (mid-2025 estimate). World Christian Database, via Zurlo, Johnson & Crossing, International Bulletin of Mission Research (2025)
10% of people surveyed in 42 countries call themselves “convinced atheists”. Gallup International, end-of-year survey 2024 (published July 2025)
Figures last checked 15 November 2026. Counts are estimates from censuses and surveys, not a live tally.
Atheist, agnostic, “none”: what’s the difference?
These words get used interchangeably, but they measure different things, which is why you will see very different numbers quoted online.
- Atheist: someone who does not believe in any god. In most surveys this means people who choose “atheist” as their label.
- Agnostic: someone who says the existence of a god is unknown or unknowable.
- Religiously unaffiliated (“nones”): anyone who does not identify with a religion when asked, including atheists, agnostics and people who say “nothing in particular”. This is the big number at the top of the page.
Being unaffiliated is about identity, not belief. Plenty of “nones” still believe in something: Pew found that 54% of religiously unaffiliated US adults believe in God or a universal spirit (Pew Research Center). So the 1.9 billion figure is best read as “people who don’t belong to a religion”, not “1.9 billion atheists”.
Where the numbers come from
The headline (≈1.9 billion, 24.2% of the world, 2020) comes from Pew Research Center’s 2025 study of global religious change, which combined more than 2,700 censuses and surveys covering 201 countries and territories. It found the unaffiliated grew by about 270 million between 2010 and 2020, more than any group except Muslims (Pew Research Center, 2025). 2020 is the latest year in Pew’s study; COVID-19 delayed many of the censuses it relies on.
The atheist figure (≈145 million, mid-2025) comes from the World Christian Database, published by researchers at Gordon-Conwell’s Center for the Study of Global Christianity. The same table counts about 761 million agnostics, for roughly 907 million “nonreligionists” in total (Zurlo, Johnson & Crossing, 2025). Their categories differ from Pew’s: for example, the database counts about 448 million followers of Chinese folk religion, many of whom would not pick a religious label in a survey, which helps explain why its non-religious total is lower than Pew’s.
The survey line (10% “convinced atheists”) comes from Gallup International’s end-of-year survey of nearly 43,000 people in 42 countries, published in July 2025. Another 30% said they were “not religious”. It is a poll of selected countries, not a world census, so we show it as a percentage rather than turning it into a head count (Gallup International, 2025).
Why we don’t run a ticking “live” counter: none of these sources publishes a current growth rate, and simply extending the 2010–2020 trend would be our guess dressed up as data. When new estimates come out, we update the numbers here.
Countries with the most non-religious people
| Country | Religiously unaffiliated (2020) | Share of population |
|---|---|---|
| China | ≈1.28 billion | 89.6% |
| United States | ≈101 million | 29.7% |
| Japan | ≈73 million | 57.5% |
| Vietnam | ≈66 million | 67.7% |
| Germany | ≈30 million | 36.1% |
| Russia | ≈30 million | 20.2% |
| Brazil | ≈28 million | 13.5% |
| France | ≈28 million | 42.6% |
| United Kingdom | ≈27 million | 40.2% |
| South Korea | ≈25 million | 48.3% |
About two-thirds of the world’s non-religious people live in China, where the government promotes atheism. The United States has the second-largest number, even though the unaffiliated are under a third of Americans.
The countries where most people have no religion
| Country or territory | Unaffiliated share (2020) |
|---|---|
| China | 89.6% |
| North Korea | 72.9% |
| Czech Republic | 72.8% |
| Hong Kong | 71.4% |
| Vietnam | 67.7% |
| Macao | 67.6% |
| Japan | 57.5% |
| Netherlands | 54.1% |
| Uruguay | 52.4% |
| New Zealand | 51.4% |
Outside East Asia, the fastest growth has been in countries where many people raised Christian stop identifying with a religion as adults. Between 2010 and 2020 the unaffiliated share rose by 17 points in Australia and Chile, 16 in Uruguay and 13 in the United States.