How Many Muslims Live in Utah?

On March 15, 2019, the Khadeeja Islamic Center in West Valley City opened its doors to anyone who wanted to come and pray. 49 people had been shot dead in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, the day before. The final toll reached 51. State officials arrived, and police stood outside.

KSL's account of that afternoon carried a line of demography. "There are 60,000 Muslims in Utah, according to the Islamic Society of Greater Salt Lake," they wrote.

Three years later, Fox 13 covered the same organization building a modular home for its imam, because rent along the Wasatch Front had outrun what the congregation could cover. Society trustee Ghulam Patel told the outlet there were only 120 Muslims living in Utah in 1980.

"There are at least 12 masjid in Utah now, so it’s grown quite a bit," society trustee Ghulam Patel told Fox 13. "I would guess we are close to 100,000 now."

Patel said plainly that his 100,000 estimate was a guess. The count of 60,000 was never much firmer.

It's the one that stuck. KSL used it again in 2021, covering a Utah Muslim Civic League event at the Capitol, and again in 2024.

It was already in use for a different population. The Office of the Legislative Fiscal Analyst told a legislative subcommittee in a 2015 brief that about 60,000 refugees and their children lived in Utah. PBS used the same figure for refugees in 2016.

Refugees and Muslims are overlapping groups, not identical ones, and 60,000 has now been attached to both.

The population kept growing while the reported figure stayed put. Utah's foreign-born residents grew by about 92,000 between 2014 and 2024. What never happened was a recount. The census is barred from asking about religion, and no state agency tracks it. Neither of Utah's research universities has taken it up, nor has any polling firm working here, nor any newsroom, including this one.

A round figure offered during a week of mourning became the number of record, and it stayed there because nothing arrived to replace it.

The census figures

The best available source is the U.S. Religion Census, compiled every 10 years by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies. The Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute published the Utah figures in a May 2024 data brief, summarized in an accompanying news release.

Muslim adherents in Utah: 4,998 in 2010, 25,403 in 2020. Mosques: nine in 2010, 14 in 2020. Gardner listed Muslims among the three fastest-growing religious groups in the state over that decade, against 11.3% growth for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

An adherent, in this survey, is someone connected to a congregation. The community's own estimate counts anyone who calls themselves Muslim. Those are different populations, and the distance between 25,403 and 60,000 is not evidence that either side is inflating.

The mosque count is the figure worth leaning on. Nationally, the US Mosque Survey found 2,769 mosques in 2020, a 31% increase over 2010. Gardner puts Utah's increase at 55.6%, nearly twice that pace.

The adherent totals are shakier. They imply a 408% increase. Nationally over the same decade, the Religion Census counted a rise from 2.6 million Muslims to 4.5 million, roughly 73%. They also move Utah from far below the national average in adherents per mosque to above it without a matching jump in buildings, by Utahn's calculation from the published figures. That pattern points to method rather than population.

The census does not count Muslim adherents directly. Its 2020 figure rests on a mosque survey whose mailed questionnaire drew a 5.5% response rate and whose second phase completed 470 telephone interviews nationwide, stratified by state. Utah's number is an estimate scaled from that sample, not a count.

Pew Research Center cannot settle it either. Its 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study puts Muslims at under 1% of Utah adults, with a margin of error for the state of plus or minus 7.3 percentage points. A sample that noisy cannot resolve a group that small.

What people use instead

Four estimates are in circulation, and no two of them were produced the same way. Patel's 100,000 comes from an interview with a news outlet. The Civic League's 60,000 is an advocacy figure inherited from 2019. The Religion Census figure of 25,403 counts congregants and may be built on a shifting method. Pew's number is below its own ability to detect.

Even the buildings are contested. Patel counted at least 12 mosques in 2022, while the Religion Census said 14 in 2020 and KSL reported 14 in 2024.

The 100,000 number has also come from outside the community. Defending a social media post about a Shia religious procession in Taylorsville in August 2024, Rep. Trevor Lee, R-Layton, asked KSL why the video had drawn such a reaction. "Is it because we have a housing crisis in Utah, yet we're importing over 100,000 refugees in our state in the last decade?"

Five years before Lee said that, Gov. Gary Herbert wrote President Trump asking him to send Utah refugees. Utah had historically resettled more than 1,000 refugees a year, the governor wrote, and the number had fallen two years running.

Ten years at Herbert's rate is 10,000. Utah's entire refugee population, accumulated since the Vietnam War, runs between 60,000 and 70,000. A 2020 Gardner Institute study logged more than 8,279 arrivals over the previous 10 years. Utahn found no correction.

Where the growth came from

The institutional history is short. The Islamic Society of Utah registered with the state in 1984, and an old church bought the following year became Masjid Al Noor, the first Muslim house of worship in Utah. The first Muslims here were foreign students. One of them, according to a Brigham Young University undergraduate study, arrived from Iraq at Utah State in 1958.

The presence runs older than the institutions. The Al Mustafa Foundation of Utah mounted an exhibit in 2025 called Utah Muslim Heritage: 100+ Years of History, and the Utah State Historical Society gave it an Outstanding Achievement award.

Refugee resettlement built the modern community, mostly through Bosnian and Somali arrivals in the 1990s and 2000s. That channel has closed. Arrivals to Utah peaked at 1,555 in 2016 and fell to 261 in 2020, recovered briefly on the Afghan evacuation and the war in Ukraine, then stopped.

Herbert's letter, written between those first two points, doesn't appear to have changed the trajectory. President Trump suspended the refugee program on Jan. 20, 2025. Catholic Community Services of Utah announced it would wind down a 50-year-old resettlement operation, then kept a reduced version running for existing clients on private donations.

The fiscal 2026 ceiling was set at 7,500 nationally, the lowest in the program's history, allocated primarily to Afrikaners from South Africa. In May 2026 the administration raised it to 17,500, assigning every additional slot to Afrikaners.

We could find no one who has broken down what replaced it. The ordinary channels are the most likely: students, work visas, family reunification, and births in a young population. Utah's foreign-born residents grew from 250,000 to 342,000 (about a 37% increase) between 2014 and 2024, while refugee arrivals over the same period ran in the low thousands.

The count

Nothing in the record suggests the population is shrinking. The defensible range today runs from roughly 25,000 to roughly 60,000, and the true figure is probably not at either end.

The last time anyone collected data on Utah's mosques was Ihsan Bagby's national mosque survey, whose count phase ran from June to November 2019. That is the same year the Muslim 60,000 entered the record, as far as Utahn can find.

Gov. Spencer Cox declared July Muslim American Heritage Month in 2022. The fifth one ends this week.

In March of 2019, on a day when Utah's Muslims were grieving the dead in New Zealand, somebody asked the Islamic Society how many of them there were living in the state. The society answered as well as it could. That number has been repeated ever since.

Article edited by Clint Betts. What are we missing? What did this piece get wrong? Email the editor at clint@utahn.com.