Latter-day Saints Today

How many Latter-day Saints are there?

The Latter-day Saint church reported 17,887,212 members on December 31, 2025.¹ That is up from 14,131,467 at the end of 2010, a rise of about 27 percent by this site's calculation.¹²

Pew Research Center's global estimates for 2010 to 2020 use seven broad categories, and Latter-day Saints are not one of them.³ Pew counts everyone who identifies as Christian, and its 2011 report on Christianity named Latter-day Saints among the smaller Christian groups it counts.³⁴ That is a counting rule, not an answer to whether the faith is Christian; the hub gives both views.

Why do membership records and survey counts differ?

The church counts everyone with a membership record, while Pew counts the adults who say they are Latter-day Saints when asked their religion.⁵ As the church explained in 2008, it creates a record when a person is baptized, and also for a child with the parents' consent. The current General Handbook says a person age 9 or older with a record but no baptism is not a member of record.⁶⁷

A church statistician described the count as inclusive by intent and design⁶. The church calls baptism a covenant that is not casually dismissed, says members who drift away may return, and says its numbers do not represent activity rates.⁸⁶ These statements date from 2007 and 2008. The church's current General Handbook says a member may resign by a signed request, and that when a membership council withdraws membership, church headquarters removes the record.⁹

In its 2023 to 2024 Religious Landscape Study of 36,908 US adults, 2 percent identified as Latter-day Saints.¹⁰⁵ The church's records count 6,929,770 members in the United States at the end of 2025.¹¹ The two figures are not directly comparable, since the records include children and members whatever their level of activity.

Where do Latter-day Saints live?

The United States has the most members of record, and Brazil and Mexico are almost tied for second. The table gives the five countries with the most members of record among the 160 countries and territories on the church's statistics pages. The five figures are dated December 31, 2025. Some smaller pages show no date or an older one, and none of those gives more than 190,066. The ranking is this site's comparison of those figures.^121113141516

Country	Members of record, December 31, 2025
United States	6,929,770
Brazil	1,573,360
Mexico	1,572,287
Philippines	905,082
Peru	667,836

Within the United States, Pew's survey of 2023 to 2024 found that 53 percent of Latter-day Saint adults live in the eight Mountain states, and 31 percent in Utah.⁵

What do the projections say?

Pew's April 2015 projections for 2010 to 2050 cover eight broad groups and do not project Latter-day Saints separately.¹⁷

How is the church organized?

The church's Newsroom describes a church led by 15 apostles. The most senior is its president, who selects two other apostles as counselors. The three form the First Presidency, the highest governing body, and twelve others form the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. The Newsroom adds that members regard all of the apostles as special witnesses of Jesus Christ.¹⁸

A local congregation is called a ward and is led by a bishop. A group of wards forms a stake, led by a stake president. The Newsroom says these leaders are unsalaried.¹⁸ At the end of 2025 the church had 3,695 stakes, 32,046 wards and branches, and 451 missions.¹ It had 204 temples in operation and 78,596 full-time teaching missionaries at that date.¹⁹

What questions do Latter-day Saints and others raise today?

This section covers women's roles, marriage and sexuality, the church's past on race, and hostility toward Latter-day Saints, which draws on Pew and on a scholar's summary of FBI figures. The newest church announcements cited are from 2019 and 2020.^20212223

Women's roles. The church's Newsroom states that men serve in priesthood offices, which let them officiate in ordinances and take part in church administration. Women serve as missionaries and teachers, preside over other organizations, and take part in leadership councils in congregations.²⁰ In October 2019 the church announced that any baptized member, including women and children, may witness a baptism outside the temple. It added that any endowed member with a current temple recommend, women included, may witness sealings.²⁴

Ordain Women is a group that asks the church to ordain women to the priesthood. Its home page, which carries no date, says it aims to create a space to raise issues of gender inequality and to call attention to the need for women's ordination.²⁵

The Deseret News names the church as its owner.²⁶ In March 2014 it reported that a church spokeswoman, Jessica Moody, wrote to the group on the church's behalf: Ordination of women to the priesthood is a matter of doctrine that is contrary to the Lord's revealed organization for his church.²⁷ The paper reported spokeswoman Kate Kelly as saying the group would keep asking and knocking, as Matthew 7:7 directs. Kelly also said: The only thing we're going to demonstrate is that we're ready for the blessings and responsibilities of the priesthood.²⁷²⁷

Marriage and sexuality. The church's 1995 proclamation on the family states that marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God. It adds that the family is central to God's plan for his children's eternal destiny.²⁸

In April 2019 the church said that its handbook had called a member's same-gender marriage apostasy. Such a marriage would remain a serious transgression, it said, but would not be treated as apostasy for church discipline. It said children of parents who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender could be baptized without First Presidency approval. The custodial parents must give permission and understand the doctrine and covenants involved. The church said the changes did not shift its doctrine on marriage or chastity.²¹

Affirmation, an organization for LGBTQ people connected to the church and their families, says it promotes understanding, acceptance, and self-determination²⁹.²⁹ In Pew's 2023 to 2024 Religious Landscape Study, 46 percent of US Latter-day Saint adults said homosexuality should be accepted by society, up from 24 percent in 2007.⁵

Race and the church's past. From 1852 until 1978, the church did not ordain Black men to its priesthood. Men and women of Black African descent also could not take part in the temple endowment and sealing ordinances. In 1978 the church announced a revelation ending the restriction. The church's essay says Brigham Young's explanation drew on then-common ideas that Black people descended from Cain and Ham, an explanation the church has since disavowed. It says there is no documented revelation about the restriction's origin, and that later presidents kept it because they believed a revelation from God was needed to end it.²²

Gregory Prince, a pathologist and the author of Power from on High, a book on the development of the priesthood, said in a 2006 interview that once in place the restriction came to be seen as doctrine and not only policy. He called the folklore that grew around the restriction, including ideas of a cursed lineage, wrong and said it should be thrown away. The church, he said, should own up to that and apologize if needed.³⁰

In 2013 the church published this statement: Today, the Church disavows the theories advanced in the past that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse, or that it reflects unrighteous actions in a premortal life; that mixed-race marriages are a sin; or that blacks or people of any other race or ethnicity are inferior in any way to anyone else.²²²² Church News, an official church publication, reports a joint statement with NAACP leaders in May 2018, calling for civility and racial harmony, and a joint op-ed in June 2020, calling for racial reform.³¹³²

Hostility toward Latter-day Saints. Pew's yearly count of countries where religious groups were harassed has no Latter-day Saint category. The edition covering 2023 reports eight groups, among them Christians, Muslims, and Jews, so it gives no count of incidents against Latter-day Saints.³³

Pew's surveys of Americans measure attitudes, not incidents. Pew asked about several religious groups in a September 2022 survey of US adults. A quarter had a very or somewhat unfavorable view of Latter-day Saints, 15 percent a favorable view, and 59 percent were neutral or did not know enough to say. In the same survey, 22 percent had an unfavorable view of Muslims and 18 percent of Catholics. The survey used the older nickname; the hub explains.²³

For incidents, David Smith of the University of Sydney writes that violence against Latter-day Saints is relatively rare in the United States today, but that aversion to them is not. He reports that the FBI counted 160 reported hate crimes against Latter-day Saint victims from 2015 to 2024, including 63 acts of vandalism or property destruction and 29 assaults. A 2019 Deseret News report, he adds, found such incidents far fewer than hate crimes against Jews and Muslims.³⁴