Methodology
We would rather you knew how these numbers were made than trusted them. This page says where each figure comes from, how it is checked, and where it is weakest. Some of it is still short, and we have marked which parts.
This work is researched, built, and kept current by the Greater Austin Mission Society.
Demographics
Population, median age, median household income, and racial and ethnic composition come from the American Community Survey, retrieved through Census Reporter. The current edition is 2026 edition, ACS 2020-2024, drawn from the ACS 2024 5-year release. These are survey estimates, not counts. In smaller divisions the margin of error is wide enough to matter, and those pages say so.
Churches
Church records come from our own database, which holds 1,151 congregations across the fifteen divisions, each verified against public sources in a recurring stewardship pass. The snapshot behind these pages was taken 2026-08-30. A congregation is counted as active unless there is evidence it has closed. Records carry the date they were last verified, which is often older than the snapshot date.
How we verify a record
A record counts as verified only once it has been checked against a primary source, not merely entered. We start with an organization's own website: its About, Staff, or Leadership pages, and its denomination's official directory where one exists. Third-party directories and listing sites help us find what to check, but they never establish a fact on their own, since they carry outdated and duplicated records more often than an organization's own page does. An archived version of a site is the last resort, used only when nothing current can be found.
Verification happens in batches, on a recurring schedule, and each record carries the date it was last checked. That date can be older than the snapshot behind the page you are reading, and both are shown honestly rather than one standing in for the other.
Not every question has a clean answer, and we would rather say so than guess. Two organizations sharing a building is ordinary in a metro this size, so a shared address alone never merges two records into one; a merge requires at least two independent facts pointing the same way. Anything without decisive evidence, a coordinate that looks wrong, a congregation that might have closed, a record that could be a duplicate, is flagged for a person to resolve rather than decided automatically. An honest gap in this database is a more faithful record than a confident-looking answer we cannot back up.
Why Census County Divisions
A county is too large to describe a community and a census tract is too small to organize around. Census County Divisions sit between them, and in Texas they are drawn to follow recognizable communities. Fifteen of them make up the functional core of the Austin metro. No figure on this site is published below that level.
How we group churches
Congregations are grouped by religious family following the Association of Religion Data Archives Group Profiles standard, with the RELTRAD tradition typology behind it. We did not invent a taxonomy of our own. Using the standard one means our counts can be set beside other research on American religion instead of standing alone, and it keeps us from drawing the lines wherever they happen to suit us.
The database holds three tiers. Family is the broad grouping, and it is the only one this site shows. Group is the specific body, the difference between one Lutheran synod and another. Tradition is the six-category scheme sociologists of religion use: Evangelical Protestant, Mainline Protestant, Black Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox Christian, and other groups.
We show the family tier alone for two reasons. It is the tier a reader can actually use, and it is the only one that is close to complete. Group is recorded on 558 of 1,151 congregations and tradition on 1,124, so publishing either would present a fraction of the field as though it were the whole of it.
Non-Denominational/Independent
404
Non-denominational Christian ChurchesEvangelical Protestant unless the congregation says otherwise
Baptist
241
Baptist FamilyBy group
Pentecostal
123
Pentecostal FamilyEvangelical, or Black Protestant where the body is historically Black
Lutheran
65
Lutheran FamilyMissouri and Wisconsin Synod Evangelical; ELCA Mainline
Methodist
72
Methodist and Pietist FamilyUnited Methodist Mainline; AME and CME Black Protestant; Global Methodist Evangelical
Catholic
50
Catholic Liturgical FamilyCatholic
Church of Christ
44
Restorationist FamilyEvangelical Protestant
Presbyterian/Reformed
43
Presbyterian and Reformed FamilyPCA, OPC, EPC and ECO Evangelical; PCUSA Mainline
Episcopal
32
Anglican and Episcopal FamilyMainline Protestant
Disciples of Christ
14
Restorationist FamilyMainline Protestant
Anglican
12
Anglican and Episcopal FamilyEvangelical Protestant
Eastern Orthodox
11
Eastern Liturgical FamilyOrthodox Christian
Other
40
No single family, by designResolved for each congregation
Counts from the snapshot of 2026-08-30.
Four of these choices are ours rather than the standard's, and we would rather name them than have you find them. We keep Episcopal and Anglican apart, and Church of Christ apart from Disciples of Christ, where the standard puts each pair in one family, because in this metro those pairs describe congregations with genuinely different convictions and merging them would hide something true. Non-denominational congregations are counted as Evangelical Protestant, which follows the Religion Census convention rather than our judgment about any particular church. And "Other" is not a leftover drawer; it holds congregations whose body does not correspond to a single family, and each one is resolved on its own record.
One limit worth stating. This taxonomy describes what a congregation belongs to, not what it believes. A family label tells you a church is Baptist. It does not tell you what that church teaches, and we do not want it read as though it did.
Compared with the 2020 Religion Census
The Religion Census is a national count of religious congregations, gathered roughly once a decade from denominations' own reporting rather than verified congregation by congregation, and published at the county level by the Association of Religion Data Archives. It is built differently than our database is, so we treat its count as an outside check rather than a rival number to reconcile against: a second, independently gathered look at the same city.
Its most recent full count, from 2020, found 1,224 churches and 871,549 religious adherents across the counties that make up the Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos metro, split closely between Protestant (439,221) and Catholic and Orthodox (432,328) traditions, with Evangelical Protestant the largest single tradition at 58.4 percent of adherents. Our own database counts 1,151 active churches across the fifteen divisions today, arrived at one verified record at a time rather than through denominational reporting, and it does not carry an adherent total to set beside that one. The two counts sit close enough to trust each other's shape, and different enough in method and vintage that neither corrects the other.
How we classify what a congregation teaches
We evaluate one more thing about a congregation than its denomination, and it is the hardest thing on this site to say well. It is not published. This section explains the method anyway, because a judgment we make privately about a church is one we should be willing to describe in public, and because you should be able to tell what we are and are not claiming.
What the classification is for
Denomination tells you what a congregation belongs to. It does not tell you what that congregation teaches, and the gap between those two is where this classification lives. A church can carry a historic name and have moved a long way from what that name once meant, in either direction. We work with churches across the metro, and knowing where a congregation actually stands is part of working with it honestly.
The four values
Historically Orthodox. The congregation is Trinitarian, creedally grounded, and holds traditional sexual ethics. The standard is broader than reciting a creed: a church can affirm the Apostles' Creed without reservation and still fall outside this value, and some do.
Heterodox. The congregation either denies an essential doctrine of the Christian faith, or affirms LGBTQ+ relationships as a congregation. We say that plainly because a vaguer sentence would hide what we are actually measuring. Either finding requires evidence from the congregation itself. Denomination is never sufficient. We do not conclude anything about a church from the body it belongs to; we look at what that particular church says about itself, in its own words, on its own material.
Undetermined. One of two things is true. We looked and could not tell from publicly available information, or the congregation belongs to a body whose churches vary widely and it has given no signal of its own. This is the honest default, not a euphemism and not a soft no. It says nothing about the congregation and everything about the evidence available to us, and a conversation with someone who knows the church often settles it.
Non-Protestant. The congregation belongs to the historic Catholic or Orthodox liturgical stream, however it is governed. That includes Roman Catholic and Eastern Catholic parishes in communion with Rome, the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox communions, and also Independent, Old Catholic, and other bodies in those streams that are not in communion with Rome or Constantinople. Communion is not the test. Belonging to the liturgical stream is. These congregations are identified by their branch and tradition and are not evaluated by this classification at all, because our standard is an evangelical Protestant one and these bodies do not sit inside it.
Two limits on that value, and both matter. It does not reach a body that merely uses the Catholic or Orthodox name while standing outside those streams. And it does not reach a body that is not Trinitarian; those are evaluated on their own congregation-level evidence like anyone else, whatever they call themselves.
The scope, which is the part most easily misread
This classification measures one thing: whether a Protestant congregation holds to or has departed from the convictions we work from. That scope has to be stated plainly, because on a purely creedal reading the Catholic and Eastern communions are historically orthodox in the fullest sense, and applying a value built to detect Protestant drift to a Catholic parish would say something we do not mean. So those congregations take the fourth value instead. Their tradition is carried by the ordinary denomination data, which is public and unremarkable.
We evaluate from an evangelical Protestant position and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Naming the standard is what makes the classification answerable rather than merely confident.
What we hold ourselves to
Every classification is substantiated on the record, dated, and re-verified against the congregation's own current material rather than a search result. A value can change, and several have. Where evidence is thin the value is Undetermined rather than a guess pointed in whichever direction seems likely.
We are describing congregations, not judging Christians, and we are aware that a line of prose cannot carry the whole truth about a church. If we have a congregation wrong, we would rather hear it than keep the record as it stands.
Logos
Where a congregation or organization has a public logo, we show it to identify them, never to imply endorsement, and we will remove it at their request. The correction link on any record is the way to ask.
Corrections
We are not the authority on the church in Austin. We are one group of people trying to see it clearly, and we get things wrong. Every record in the directory carries a correction link, and the corrections page explains the pathway: what happens after you write, the thirty-day review commitment, and what it means when a record is under review. Email also works: info@missionatx.org.
Sources
- American Community Survey, ACS 2024 5-year, US Census Bureau, by way of Census Reporter.
- Association of Religion Data Archives, US Religion Group Profiles, for the family and group taxonomy.
- Association of Religion Data Archives, 2020 U.S. Religion Census county-level data, for the outside benchmark of churches and adherents in the metro area.
- Steensland et al., "The Measure of American Religious Traditions," Social Forces 79 (2000), 291 to 318, for the tradition typology.
- TIGER/Line 2024 boundary files, US Census Bureau, for the division boundaries.
- Our own database of churches and ministries across the Austin metro.