American readers bought roughly 19 million Bibles in 2025, the highest figure in twenty-one years: per Publishers Weekly (January 9, 2026), Circana BookScan recorded a twelve percent rise over 2024 and double the unit sales of 2019. The climb in scripture sales, steady now for several years, has outlasted most of the explanations offered for it.
Brenna Connor, an industry analyst at Circana, pointed to “a bigger search for hope and community.” The year’s best-selling adult Bible was The Invitation New Testament from B&H; the top children’s title was The Action Bible: God’s Redemptive Story by Sergio Cariello, published by David C Cook. BookScan counts what crosses retail scanners, which makes scripture one of the few religious commodities whose American sales can be tracked at all — and in 2025 the counters kept climbing.
Britain tells the same story at lower volume. Sam Richardson, chief executive of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, told Publishers Weekly that 2025 Bible sales were 134 percent higher than in 2008, when records begin, with Crossway’s English Standard Version the year’s best-selling translation. Richardson credited “worldwide political and social change” and “a growing mental health crisis” with pushing readers toward “questions of meaning and spirituality.”
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The scale, from the publishing side, is considerable. Mark Schoenwald, president and CEO of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, said lifetime sales of the NIV Study Bible have passed ten million copies, with three consecutive years of double-digit growth across formats.
What the numbers do not yet contain is a portrait of the buyer. Sales are counted at the register; the readers behind them — first-time buyers, replacement copies, gifts, reading groups — remain a matter of inference. For an industry that has watched general print demand flatten, religion publishing is now one of its most dependable counters, and the scripture itself, rather than any commentary on it, is the thing moving fastest.