Original research
US church statistics
Membership numbers for American churches are well covered elsewhere. What almost nobody publishes is operational data: when congregations actually meet, what they gather for, and how that varies by tradition and region. These studies are drawn from our directory of 289,395 US churches. Every figure is free to cite, and every study ships a downloadable dataset.
Studies
What time do US churches meet?
152,989 published service records from 89,609 churches, normalized into start times by state, denomination, day and language.
- 10:00 AM is the most common Sunday start time (21,904 churches)
- 98.0% of churches have begun by 11 AM
- 4,739 churches hold Wednesday services
About this data
Our directory holds 289,395 US churches with verified street addresses. That is a count of listings we can locate — not an estimate of every congregation in the country, and it should not be read as one.
Each study states its own coverage explicitly, because the share of churches publishing a given attribute varies enormously. Where a figure is a floor rather than a total, we say so.
Last updated 2026-07-31.