How many Muslims are there in the world? 2026 figures, country by country

About 2.1 billion in 2026, roughly a quarter of all people, by the estimate of the team behind the World Religion Database. Pew Research Center’s latest estimate is 2.02 billion in 2020, 25.6% of humanity. Indonesia, Pakistan and India have the most Muslims, and about eight in ten Muslims live in Muslim-majority countries.

No one counts every Muslim on earth in one year. The figures below come from two kinds of source: researchers who combine thousands of censuses and surveys into world estimates, and the official counts of individual countries. Where they differ, we say why.

The world figure

• 2020, Pew’s estimate: 2,022,590,000, or 25.6% of the world. This is Pew Research Center’s figure, published in June 2025 and built from more than 2,700 censuses, surveys and registers. It counts people by how they describe their own religion.
• 2026, estimated: 2,105,142,000, about 25.4% of a world of 8.3 billion. This comes from the Center for the Study of Global Christianity (Gina Zurlo, Todd Johnson and Peter Crossing), the team behind the World Christian Database and the World Religion Database, which Zurlo edits. Their table, published in January 2026 and drawn from the World Christian Database, counts religious adherents.
• 2025, the World Religion Database: 25.16% of the world, as reported by the Association of Religion Data Archives; it puts 22.44% of the world’s people as Sunni, 2.50% as Shia and 0.21% as other Islamic groups.

The two teams start from different counting methods, so their 2020 figures differ by about 100 million (2.02 billion for Pew, 1.92 billion for the World Religion Database team). Older articles that say “1.6 billion” are quoting Pew’s earlier estimate for 2010, which Pew has since revised to 1.68 billion.

Country by country

Pew’s ten largest Muslim populations in 2020, with the Muslim share of each country:

Together these ten hold 65% of the world’s Muslims. Pew’s report prints counts for the top ten but not for the next ten, so for those we multiplied each country’s 2020 population by its Muslim share in Pew’s country table; these are approximate: Ethiopia about 43.0 million (36.2%), Iraq 41.9 million, Afghanistan 39.0 million, Morocco 36.5 million, Yemen 36.1 million, Uzbekistan 32.1 million, Saudi Arabia 28.7 million, China 25.7 million (1.8%), Niger 23.3 million and Malaysia 21.7 million.

By region, 58.7% of Muslims live in Asia and the Pacific, 20.5% in the Middle East and North Africa, 18.2% in sub-Saharan Africa, 2.2% in Europe and 0.3% in North America. Muslims are a majority in 53 of the 201 countries and territories Pew studied.

What national counts say

Countries count religion in different ways, and many do not count it at all. The latest official figures we could check:

Some notes on reading them:

• Indonesia’s figure comes from the religion field on identity records, not a census, and is four years later than Pew’s.
• Pakistan’s census records Ahmadis in a separate category; some world estimates count them differently.
• India’s 2021 census was postponed, so Pew’s 213 million is projected from 2011. Egypt’s figure is projected from its 2006 census, and several Gulf states’ from estimates of their migrant populations.
• Nigeria, Egypt and Turkey publish no current census count of religion, and France’s law bars the census from asking. Figures for Nigeria, Turkey and France come from surveys; Egypt’s is projected from the religion results of its 2006 census.
• Germany’s estimate covers Muslims with roots in Muslim-majority countries only, so it leaves out converts.
• The United States asks no religion question in its census. Pew’s 2025 report puts Muslims at 1.2% of Americans in 2020, up from its 2017 figure in the table.

Why the number grows

Between 2010 and 2020 the number of Muslims grew 21%, twice as fast as the rest of the world. Pew’s explanation is mostly about age: Muslims are the youngest major religious group, with a median age of 24.1 against 30.6 for the world, and a third are under 15. Muslim women also had the highest fertility of any group, 3.1 children on average in 2010-15, though Pew notes this partly reflects where Muslims live.

Changing religion makes little difference either way. About one in 100 adults raised Muslim has left Islam, Pew found, and a similar number have entered it, slightly more entering than leaving.

Projections, and how far to trust them

• Pew, 2015: about 2.2 billion Muslims in 2030 and 2.76 billion (29.7%) in 2050, close to Christians at 2.92 billion. Extending the model, the two would be level at about 32% each around 2070.
• Pew, 2017 update: about 3.0 billion Muslims in 2060, with Muslims outnumbering Christians from about 2075.
• Center for the Study of Global Christianity, 2026: 3.42 billion Muslims in 2075, still behind Christians at 3.68 billion.

The projections disagree because they assume different things about birth rates, conversion and data. Pew presents its figures as projections of what happens if current trends continue, and warns that “many factors could alter these trajectories”.

What the Qur’an and Sunnah say about numbers

The Prophet ﷺ hoped his followers would be many:

Al-Nawawi (d. 1277) called this a sign of prophethood: he said it “at a time when the Muslims were few”, and Allah then spread Islam to the extent everyone knows. Ibn Hajar (d. 1449) linked the hope to the Qur’an itself, a miracle that keeps reaching people not yet born, and wrote that it has been fulfilled. In another hadith he said plainly, “I am the prophet with the most followers” (Muslim 196, sahih (Muslim); our translation). He hoped his ummah would be half the people of Paradise (Bukhari 6528, sahih (al-Bukhari)), and in a hadith al-Tirmidhi graded hasan, he said that of Paradise’s 120 rows, 80 would be from this ummah (Tirmidhi 2546, sahih (al-Albani); hasan (Zubair Ali Zai)).

He also linked marriage to the size of his ummah on the Day of Resurrection:

In Anas’s narration, which Ibn Hajar called authentic, the words end “on the Day of Resurrection”. The nations here, al-Munawi (d. 1622) explains, are the earlier nations, whom he will surpass in number, and al-’Azim Abadi (d. 1911) reads it as taking pride in the number of his followers. Al-Munawi also quotes Abu Zur’ah al-’Iraqi (d. 1423), who read “child-bearing” as a woman able to have children rather than one who has many.

The same Sunnah warns that numbers are not strength. The Qur’an reminds the believers that at Hunayn “your great number pleased you, but it did not avail you at all” (Qur’an 9:25), and the Prophet ﷺ described a day when Muslims would be many yet “foam, like the foam of a flood” (Abu Dawud 4297, sahih (al-Albani)). Our page on that hadith covers what scholars say it means.

Common questions

Read next: “You will be many, but foam”: the hadith of wahn

Sources

1. Pew Research Center (Hackett et al.), How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020, 9 June 2025: world, regional and country figures (pp. 53-58), Appendix B country table, age, fertility, switching and methodology. pewresearch.org
2. Pew Research Center, “Muslim population change”, a section of the 2025 report. pewresearch.org
3. Center for the Study of Global Christianity (Zurlo, Johnson and Crossing), Status of Global Christianity, 2026, in the Context of 1900-2075. worldchristiandatabase.org
4. Association of Religion Data Archives, World profile, religious adherents from the World Religion Database (2025). thearda.com
5. Pew Research Center, The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050, 2 April 2015, and The Changing Global Religious Landscape, 5 April 2017. pewresearch.org and pewresearch.org
6. Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, Population and Housing Census 2023, national report, p. 136. pbs.gov.pk
7. Databoks, reporting Indonesia’s Dukcapil civil registry, first half of 2024 (Indonesian). databoks.katadata.co.id
8. The Business Standard, reporting Bangladesh’s 2022 census preliminary report, 27 July 2022. tbsnews.net
9. Pew Research Center, Religious Composition of India, 21 September 2021, on the 2011 census. pewresearch.org
10. Department of Statistics Malaysia, Population and Housing Census 2020, key findings. dosm.gov.my
11. Office for National Statistics, Religion, England and Wales: Census 2021. ons.gov.uk
12. Scotland’s Census 2022: ethnic group, national identity, language and religion. scotlandscensus.gov.uk
13. BAMF, Muslimisches Leben in Deutschland 2020 (German). bamf.de
14. INSEE, La diversité religieuse en France, 30 March 2023, from the TeO2 survey (French). insee.fr
15. Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2021 Census shows changes in Australia’s religious diversity, 28 June 2022. abs.gov.au
16. Pew Research Center, New estimates show U.S. Muslim population continues to grow, 3 January 2018. pewresearch.org
17. Al-Nawawi, Sharh Sahih Muslim, 2/188, and Ibn Hajar, Fath al-Bari, 9/7 and 9/111 (OpenITI texts, Arabic). github.com/OpenITI and github.com/OpenITI
18. Al-’Azim Abadi, ’Awn al-Ma’bud, 6/33-34, and al-Munawi, Fayd al-Qadir, 3/242, on the hadith of marrying the loving and child-bearing (OpenITI texts, Arabic). github.com/OpenITI and github.com/OpenITI

Hadith on this page

• Bukhari 4981, sahih (al-Bukhari)
• Bukhari 6528, sahih (al-Bukhari)
• Muslim 196, sahih (Muslim)
• Abu Dawud 2050, hasan sahih (al-Albani); sahih (Shu’ayb al-Arna’ut); hasan (Zubair Ali Zai)
• Abu Dawud 4297, sahih (al-Albani)
• Tirmidhi 2546, sahih (al-Albani); hasan (Zubair Ali Zai)