Median in-person worship attendance in American houses of worship rose to 70 adults in 2025, the first uptick after a quarter-century of decline, according to a new study from the Hartford Institute for Religion Research that surveyed 7,453 congregations between September and December 2025. The findings paint a picture of cautious renewal across denominations, with increases in volunteering, giving, and clergy morale alongside the attendance gains.
“The headline finding is cautious optimism,” Alison Norton, co-director of the institute, said at the annual conference of the Religion News Association in Atlanta. She described the data as a story of resilience and recalibration. “Across a range of indicators, there are signs of recovery and, in some cases, renewal,” the study’s authors wrote.
The median attendance figure, while still far below the 137 worshippers recorded in 2000, exceeds the 65 adults reported in the 2020 Faith Communities Today survey and represents the first positive movement since that earlier study. Researchers said they had braced for another round of losses. “We were pretty surprised when we saw the 2025 data,” said Scott Thumma, director of the institute. “This is the first positive gain in median attendance in 25 years,” the report noted.
Congregations split nearly evenly on growth and decline — 43% grew by at least 5% while 46% shrank by a similar margin — but for the first time in decades, more were stabilizing or expanding than shrinking, the authors said. Larger congregations were more likely to grow, Thumma noted. “After years of constraint, even modest gains can feel like recovery for these congregations.”
Catholic and Orthodox parishes posted the highest median attendance, at 200 adults, partly because those traditions have fewer individual congregations. The median evangelical church reported 75 worshippers, while the median mainline Protestant church counted 50.
Financial health also rebounded. Median income jumped from $120,000 in 2020 to $205,000 in 2025, driven heavily by the expansion of online giving. Three in four congregations now offer digital giving, compared with 58% in 2020, and roughly 40% of all revenue arrived through online channels. “People no longer need to be physically present or even remember to give in the moment,” Thumma said. Mainline churches, however, were more likely than evangelicals and non-Christian congregations to run deficits.
Fewer clergy are considering leaving the ministry, a finding Thumma linked to the broader signs of morale: “It’s not too surprising if the congregations are feeling better and more volunteers are showing up, the clergy are going to start feeling better.”
Charissa Mikoski, an assistant professor at the institute who worked on the study, emphasized that the recovering congregations are those that absorbed the lessons of the pandemic. “This is not just recovery, it’s adaptation and experimentation,” she said. The pandemic, Thumma suggested, acted as a wake-up call that forced churches to re-examine their practices.
Despite the encouraging figures, researchers were emphatic that the data do not signal a revival. “What it is not is a story of revival or return to a previous era of sort of congregational glory in the United States,” Norton said. “Congregations have been through an extraordinary period of disruption, and though it has taken a while, many have come out of it with greater clarity about who they are and what they’re called to do. That’s showing up in the data in ways that are genuinely encouraging.”
Thumma said it will take years to know whether the gains persist, noting that the institute plans a major congregational survey in 2030.