Religious populations residing in the UK

FOI reference: FOI-2024-2193

You asked

Please can you send a percentage breakdown of the following religious populations residing in the UK. From 1950s, per decade:

• Atheist 
• Catholic
• Protestant
• Hindu
• Sikh
• Muslim
• Other

We said

Thank you for your Freedom of Information request regarding religious populations.

We do produce some statistics on religion; however, this data is only gathered through the census that is conducted every 10 years.

The question on religion was first asked on the 2001 Census, so there are no statistics before this date on religion. 

A 'UK Religion table' is not yet available because the devolved administrations each carry out their own census and the questions used in the censuses differ.  

Each census in the UK is run separately by  

• Northern Ireland Statistics & Research Agency (NISRA) 

• National Records of Scotland (NRS) 

• Office for National Statistics (ONS) (for both England and Wales).  

Contact details for Scotland and Northern Ireland are provided further below.

Scotland and Northern Ireland censuses ask a question on 'belonging', whilst England and Wales ask about affiliation. 

Data for England, Wales, and England & Wales combined have been provided in the associated downloads: 

2021

• TS030 – Religion 
• TS031 – Religion (detailed) 

2011 

• KS209EW – Religion 
• QS210EW – Religion (detailed) 

2001 

• KS07 – Religion 

Source: Nomis website.  

Nomis is a service run on behalf of the Office for National Statistics (ONS) by Durham University.

For the religion question, the hundreds of thousands of write-in answers were grouped into 144 different categories. Christian was one of the main seven tick boxes, it includes Catholic and Protestant.

Most of the write-in answers that make-up these categories are denominations or branches of the 'tick-box' religions. These categories are grouped together along with the tick-box answers. So, if someone wrote 'C of E' into the 'Any other religion write-in' box, this would be grouped into the 'Church of England' category and then into 'Christian' in our published dataset. 

The figures provided for the 2001 and 2011 Censuses are from tables that have been previously commissioned. 

An equivalent table from Census 2021 has not yet been created. It may be possible to produce similar write-in answer counts for catholic and protestant for Census 2021, through our commissioned tables service. It is important to note that write-in counts provide information on how many people wrote-in a particular answer to a question. Write-in counts are not population estimates. They do not represent the number or proportion of the population who identified with that answer. 

There is currently a waiting list for the commissioned table service. Work on new requests is not expected to begin until the end of September, due to the amount of work ongoing. Please see the page linked above to download a copy of the order form which details the scale of charges for this service. 

On receipt of your completed order form, you will be added to the waiting list. Please note that any table commissioned will have to pass our strict statistical disclosure control process to ensure there is no risk of disclosure of personal information in the table. More information on this process is available here: Protecting personal data in Census 2021 results - Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk) 

Contact details for NRS and NISRA are here: 

NATIONAL RECORDS OF SCOTLAND  

Tel:    0131 3144299  

Email: statisticscustomerservices@nrscotland.gov.uk  

Website: www.nrscotland.gov.uk 

NORTHERN IRELAND STATISTICS & RESEARCH AGENCY 

Tel:   02890 255156 

Email: census@nisra.gov.uk  

Website: http://www.nisra.gov.uk/census