Membership, activity and retention
Official membership passed 17.9 million with record 2025 convert baptisms, while US retention of those raised in the Church has fallen to 54% and rolls include many who never attend.
What the Church claims
The Church is growing and 'the stone cut out of the mountain' is filling the earth; membership statistics reflect that growth.
Once the evidence is in, this claim: Holds up. Total membership is rising and 2025 brought record convert baptisms, so the growth claim is true as stated. It is true of the number the Church publishes and of little else: retention among those raised in the Church in the United States has fallen to about 54 percent, and the rolls count many who never attend, so the figure measures names rather than participation.
The record
- The 2025 statistical report (released 2026-04-04) lists 17,887,212 members, 385,490 convert baptisms (described by Deseret News as a record, up almost 25%), 91,835 new children of record, 3,695 stakes, 32,046 wards and branches, 78,596 full-time teaching missionaries and 204 operating temples. The Newsroom version later refreshed some metrics to mid-2026 figures.
- Pew's Religious Landscape Studies show US retention (raised LDS, still identify) falling from 70% (2007) to 64% (2014) to 54% (2023-24); the General Social Survey shows about 38-40% in the 2020s, down from over three-quarters in the 1970s-1990s.
- Deseret News, citing Pew 2024, reports that retention among those raised in the faith who attend at least monthly is 42%, which it presents as the highest of any US religion; Pew records Latter-day Saints as 2% of US adults.
- Official membership counts everyone baptized who has not resigned or been removed, until age 110 if lost; the Church does not publish activity rates, and independent estimates commonly put worldwide activity at 30-40%.
The moving target
- 2026-04-04: Growth continues; record convert baptisms.
- 2025-12 / 2026-04: Retention should be measured by active participation, on which the Church leads US religions.
The exchange
Church News; Deseret News; LDS Living
The Church is growing faster than ever: record baptisms, record temple construction, and the highest active-retention rate of any US religion.
The answer: Both things are true: convert growth (concentrated outside the US) accelerated in 2025, and the share of Americans raised in the Church who stay has dropped by 16 points in 17 years. Headline membership includes the non-participating; the Church does not publish activity, and the 'highest retention' framing compares active-attender retention across religions while omitting that nearly half of those raised LDS no longer identify at all.
What they get right: Critics who predicted decline in absolute numbers have been wrong; 2025 was a strong growth year on the Church's metrics.
BYU researchers; Church-affiliated analysts writing in Church-owned outlets
Self-identification surveys undercount Latter-day Saints: they miss members who answer with another label, and at roughly 2% of the US population the sample sizes are too small to carry the conclusions drawn from them.
The answer: Sampling error is a fair caution, which is why this page leans on several surveys rather than one. Pew, the Cooperative Election Study and the General Social Survey point the same direction on the same measure, the share of Americans raised in the Church who still identify with it, and the Church's own reporting cannot rebut them because it counts names on rolls and has never published an activity figure. The undercount argument would be far more persuasive if the Church released the number that would settle it.
What they get right: Convert baptisms genuinely reached a record in 2025, and growth outside the United States is real and is not what the retention data measures.
Both cases at full strength
The skeptics' case
The numbers cut both ways and the site should say so. Official membership and convert baptisms are at record levels; the best independent surveys show the Church losing about half of its American-born members and the loss accelerating among the young. What the official count cannot show is participation, which the Church declines to report. For a truth-claims site the relevant point is that disaffiliation is now the majority experience for US Gen Z and millennials raised in the faith, which is the audience of this site.
The apologetic case
By its own consistent metric the Church has grown every year since 1830, and 2025 was the best convert year on record. Every American religion is losing young members; the Church retains its active members better than any of them, and it is building temples at an unprecedented pace to serve real demand.
What would change this
Publication by the Church of activity/attendance data; Pew or GSS data showing retention recovering.
Sources
- 2025 Statistical Report of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
- See the Church's 2025 statistical report
- Latter-day Saint membership passed 17.88 million in 2025 as church's growth accelerates
- US Gen Zers and millennials are leaving the LDS church, data confirms
- Telling the full story about Latter-day Saint belief, disaffection and retention
- Latter-day Saints (Mormons) | Religious Landscape Study
An independent project. Not affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or with any organization cited here. Summaries are written here; short quotations are attributed and linked. Every page names its sources so that it can be corrected, and every page can be challenged.