Research institute · Pew Research Center
Pew 2026: 25% of US AM/FM stations have a faith focus
25% of every AM and FM station licensed by the FCC in the US, roughly 4,000 stations, is now classed as religious, and their combined coverage reaches 98% of US adults. 99 of the top 100 syndicated religious talk shows are also published as podcasts.
Source published Summarised
Key findings at a glance
- 25% of every FCC-licensed AM and FM station in the United States is now classed as religious by Pew Research Center.
- 4,000 terrestrial religious radio stations operate in the US, out of roughly 17,000 AM/FM stations licensed by the FCC.
- 98% of US adults live within the local broadcast range of at least one religious radio station.
- 45% of US adults say they ever listen to religious audio programming, across radio, podcasts and streaming combined.
- 75% of religious-audio listeners, about three-quarters, at least occasionally tune in via the AM/FM radio dial.
- 70% of religious-audio listeners, seven-in-ten, also get religious programming through podcasts or streaming services.
- 99 of the 100 most-syndicated religious talk shows are also published on demand or as podcasts, not just on the radio dial.
- 72% of religious radio stations belong to multistation ownership groups; only 28% are independently owned.
- 16% of all songs played on US religious radio in July 2025 came from just 10 individual artists or bands.
- 37% of religious radio stations primarily broadcast music, against 35% that focus on talk and 28% that blend the two.
- 81% of all spoken content on religious radio is voiced by male speakers, a sharper imbalance than the US radio industry average.
- 439,711 hours of internet-streamed broadcasts that Pew analysed across more than 2,000 religious stations during July 2025.
What the report covers
Pew Research Center's Pew-Knight Initiative built a one-month snapshot of every FCC-licensed terrestrial AM and FM station in the United States, then layered in survey data on listener behaviour and a content analysis of what those stations actually broadcast. The headline cut: 25% of the US dial, about 4,000 stations, primarily airs religious or faith-based content, almost all of it Christian. That share goes largely unmentioned in standard radio reach planners.
On the listener side, 45% of US adults say they ever tune in to religious audio programming, and around three-quarters of that group still uses the AM/FM dial as one of their listening surfaces. But the same audience is now multi-platform: seven-in-ten religious-audio listeners also get the same programming via podcasts or streaming, and 99 of the 100 most-syndicated talk shows are now published on demand as well as broadcast. Religious radio is one of the better-documented examples of an audio format that has fully shadow-published itself onto every modern delivery channel.
On the supply side, the dial is also more concentrated than the station count suggests. 72% of religious stations belong to multistation ownership groups, and the top 1% of music artists account for over half of all song plays. Some popular talk shows are syndicated on as many as half of all religious stations nationwide. The mix between music and talk is roughly even, 37% of stations are primarily music, 35% are primarily talk, 28% blend the two, but headline averages hide significant variance, particularly on news and political content.
What this means for UK marketers
Pew's headline number is American, but the underlying lesson holds in any audio market a UK media buyer is planning into. A quarter of the US AM/FM dial sits inside one religious-format envelope that most agency planners have never priced or modelled. The UK equivalent is the share of the audio market that lives outside the RAJAR-measured commercial radio universe, community stations, religious broadcasters, podcast networks and DAB-only streams that aggregate to a real audience but do not appear in standard reach charts. Programmatic audio plans built only against the names that show up in the top-line measurement product systematically under-count the long tail.
The 99-of-100 finding, every major religious talk show is also a podcast, is the bigger signal for UK buyers. It means the 'radio versus podcast' framing that still drives a lot of audio media planning is largely obsolete in this format. The same content, the same hosts and the same listener relationship are now available through three different delivery surfaces with three different ad formats. UK brands buying audio against an audience definition, 45-64, faith-active, family-and-parenting context, get more reach for the same budget by buying that audience across all three surfaces than by buying any single one. IAB UK's audio research tracks the same convergence in mainstream UK podcasting.
The third lesson sits in the variance Pew flagged. Religious stations average roughly two hours per day on news and politics, but 30% spend less than half an hour and 29% spend more than two and a half. The 'average station' in this format does not exist as a buyable unit. UK programmatic buyers running contextual rules on broad format names will deliver wildly different brand-safety outcomes between two stations carrying the same genre tag. The same logic applies to the first-touch news source data Pew published a few days earlier, a single 'news consumer' label hides four very different age cohorts. In audio buying, station-level rather than format-level filtering is the bare minimum.
How they got the data
Pew Research Center combined three data sources: a March 2025 snapshot of every FCC-licensed terrestrial AM and FM station from Radio-Locator, a 439,711-hour content analysis of internet broadcasts from more than 2,000 religious stations recorded during July 2025, and an online survey of 5,023 US adults conducted between 9 and 15 June 2025 through the Center's American Trends Panel. Stations were classified as religious if their Radio-Locator primary genre was Religious, Christian Contemporary, Gospel Music or Spanish Christian, with manual verification against station websites and broadcast content.
The content analysis covers English-language programming only, Spanish Christian stations are included in coverage and ownership figures but excluded from spoken-content topic counts. The headline 'reaches 98% of US adults' figure includes booster and translator stations that rebroadcast a primary signal; the count of distinct stations excludes these to avoid double-counting. Full topline, questionnaire and methodology document are published alongside the report on the Pew Research Center website.
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From Pew Research Center · published 26/03/2026