How Many Buddhists Are There in the World?

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 7 September 2026

Checked against the primary texts · How we check · Report a correction

About 324 million people identified as Buddhists in 2020 — just over 4% of the world’s population — according to the Pew Research Center’s global religious landscape report of 9 June 2025. Every such figure is an estimate, though, because Buddhist identity is unusually hard to count: much of it is practised without ever being declared.

Every number below carries the body that measured it and the year it refers to.

How many Buddhists are there in the world?

The best current estimate is 324 million, for 2020, published by the Pew Research Center on 9 June 2025 — “just over 4%” of the global population, down from “just under 5%” a decade earlier.

Two things matter as much as the number. First, it counts self-identification: Pew’s estimates are built, in its own words, “primarily on censuses and surveys that ask about religious identity, typically with the question, ‘What is your religion, if any?’” Second, the Buddhist world is extraordinarily concentrated — Pew reports that 98% of Buddhists live in the Asia-Pacific region, and that the ten countries with the largest Buddhist populations hold 91% of the global total, about 296 million people. For the full geography, see Buddhism around the world.

Which countries have the most Buddhists?

Thailand has the largest Buddhist population of any country: Pew’s 2020 figures give about 68 million people, 94% of the nation. China is second, with roughly 53 million — though Buddhists are only about 4% of China’s population. India, where the Buddha taught, has “approximately 10 million” Buddhists — “less than 1% of the country’s population.”

Pew’s 2025 analysis finds Buddhists in the majority in seven countries:

Five of the seven — Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Laos — are Theravada lands; Bhutan and Mongolia follow Vajrayana (Tibetan) Buddhism. For the two largest, see Buddhism in Thailand and Buddhism in China.

Why is counting Buddhists so hard?

Because the standard survey question assumes what Buddhism often has not: that religion is a single, exclusive label you either claim or don’t.

Pew is candid about this: “in several East Asian places, common translations of ‘religion’ often are understood to refer to organized, hierarchical forms of religion, such as Christianity, and some people who engage in Buddhist beliefs and practices may not consider themselves to be ‘Buddhist’ in the formal sense.” Three concrete problems follow.

Dual belonging and non-exclusive practice

China is the clearest case. In Measuring Religion in China (30 August 2023), Pew found about 4% of Chinese adults — roughly 42 million — identified as Buddhist in the 2018 Chinese General Social Survey, while 33% — about 362 million — said they believe in “Buddha (fo 佛) and/or a bodhisattva (pusa 菩萨)” in the 2018 China Family Panel Studies. Pew’s explanation: “Unlike Christianity and Islam, Buddhism does not require exclusivity of belief or practice,” and “because of Buddhism’s embeddedness in Chinese folk religion, seemingly Buddhist measures are not exclusively Buddhist, and may also capture folk religion practitioners.” Both numbers are honest; they measure different things — more at Buddhism in China.

Formal affiliation versus lived practice

Vietnam’s 2019 Population and Housing Census (reference date 1 April 2019) recorded “16 religions practiced in Viet Nam” and counted 13.2 million people who “identified as religious, or 13.7% of the total population” — 4.6 million of them Buddhist, making Buddhism “the second most common religion” after Catholicism. Set 13.7% beside the crowds at any Vietnamese pagoda and the limit is plain: the category records affiliation with a recognised body, not everyone who keeps a home altar. Buddhism in Vietnam sets that census count against a survey that simply asked people what they are.

Voluntary and coarse census categories

Even excellent statistics use a blunt instrument. In England and Wales the census religion question is voluntary: at Census 2021 (Census Day, 21 March 2021) “94.0% (56.0 million) of usual residents answered the question,” according to the Office for National Statistics, and 272,508 people described themselves as Buddhist. A single tick-box has no room for the person who sits every morning but was raised in another faith.

What counts as “being a Buddhist”?

The early texts give a minimal answer, which is part of why the statistics are slippery. In the Mahānāma Sutta the Buddha is asked how a householder becomes a lay follower — upāsaka for a man, upāsikā for a woman.

That is the whole test: going for refuge to the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Saṅgha. No register, no card — our practical guide is how to take refuge.

The same discourse then asks what makes a lay follower virtuous, and answers with abstention from killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying and intoxicants — the five precepts. Mahayana communities may add the bodhisattva vow; and in much of East Asia, as Pew’s China findings show, people practise without treating “Buddhist” as an exclusive identity. No tick-box records that. See is Buddhism a religion? and do you have to be Buddhist to practise?

Is Buddhism growing or shrinking?

Shrinking, on this measure. In a short read published 11 March 2026, Pew reported that Buddhists are “the world’s only major religious group whose population shrank between 2010 and 2020”: from “an estimated 343 million” in 2010 to 324 million, a fall of about 5%, over a decade in which the global population grew by 12%.

The reasons Pew gives are demographic rather than doctrinal:

• Age. The median Buddhist was “roughly 40 as of 2020” — “nine years older than the median age of the overall global population (31).”
• Births. Buddhists had “1.6 children per woman,” below the 2.1 replacement level — the only religion in Pew’s analysis whose 2010–2015 global fertility rate was below replacement.
• Switching. “For every 100 adults who were raised Buddhist, 12 adults have joined,” while “22 have left Buddhism and now identify with other religions or with no religion” — “a net loss of 10 adherents for every 100 people raised Buddhist.”

The decline is concentrated in East Asia, where Pew found “the total number of Buddhists in the five East Asian places fell by 32 million, or 22%.” In Japan, “roughly half of adults raised Buddhist have left the religion”; in South Korea, “six-in-ten have done so,” and the Buddhist share dropped by about 7 points over the decade, to 19% — the story told in Buddhism in Korea.

Hold that honestly. A falling headcount is a fact about birth rates and survey answers — not a measure of how far the teaching reaches.

How many Buddhists live outside Asia?

Proportionally, very few: 98% live in the Asia-Pacific region on Pew’s 2020 figures, and the 272,508 Buddhists recorded in England and Wales at Census 2021 are a fraction of a percent there.

But this is where the counting problem bites hardest. Buddhist ideas reach far more people in the West — through meditation, books, retreat centres and secular mindfulness — than any census category captures, because most have no reason to change what they write on a form. That story is Buddhism in the West.

How to read a Buddhist population figure

Whenever you meet a Buddhist population figure — including ours — ask three questions.

1. Who measured it, and when? “About 324 million” means Pew Research Center, for 2020, published 2025. A figure with no body and no year is a rumour, not a statistic.
2. What question was asked? Self-identification, formal affiliation, and belief or practice give very different answers in the same country.
3. Was answering optional? In England and Wales the religion question is voluntary, and 94.0% of usual residents answered it.

Read that way, the honest summary has two halves: around 324 million people call themselves Buddhist, and considerably more live with the Buddha’s teaching in some form. Our history of Buddhism carries both side by side.