For the first time, civil servants are more likely to describe themselves as having no religion or faith than to identify as Christian.
The Cabinet Office’s 2024 civil service statistics update shows more officials said they are "not affiliated with any religion or belief" than the number who said they are Christian, the first time the Abrahamic monotheistic religion has been the most common answer in the survey.
Some 168,870 civil servants told statistics collectors they have no religion, while 166,140 said they are Christian.
This compares to the 92,690 civil servants said they did not identify with any religion in 2019, and the 125,560 who described themselves as Christian that year. It means around 15% of civil servants now report that they have no religion, compared to around 10% five years ago.
The third-most commonly named faith was Muslim (21,660), followed by "other" (17,575), Hindu (7,265), Sikh (4,790), Buddhist (1,645) and Jewish (1,250).
While a substantial 153,645 civil servants chose not to answer the faith question, the proportion of officials disclosing their faith has risen from 55% in 2019 to 72% in 2024.
Teodor Grama, a researcher at the Institute for Government who spotted the statistic, said part of the explanation for "no religion" overtaking Christianity “may be that staff with no religion have felt increasingly comfortable disclosing it in recent years – a hypothesis that is reinforced by the drop in respondents who have chosen not to disclose their faith”.
Grama said: “This would be an encouraging development, as it would reflect an institutional culture that is welcoming of people with different outlooks.”
Another part of the explanation “may be connected to the recent uptick in younger staff within the civil service, who most available data suggests are far less likely to be religious than older staff”, Grama added.
The median age of the civil service in now 44, compared to 46 in 2019.
The statistics also show that the religious views of civil servants varies greatly by department.
The highest and lowest share of staff with no religion can be found at the centre of government – in the Cabinet Office (43%) and the Treasury (20%) respectively. The Treasury is also the department with the largest proportion of civil servants who say they believe in a different religion to the six named in the chart above (23%).
The statistics are discussed in a new IfG explainer on diversity in the civil service, authored by Grama, which shows that the civil service has made substantial overall progress on diversity in recent years, improving representation on gender, ethnicity, disability and sexual orientation, but that it is lagging behind on socioeconomic diversity.