United Bible Societies distributed more than 148 million printed Scripture resources worldwide in 2025 as the global fellowship marked its 80th anniversary and highlighted the scale of Bible distribution since its founding in 1946.
According to the recently released “UBS Distribution Statistics Report 2025,” the organization distributed 148.3 million printed Scriptures during the year, including 22.4 million complete Bibles, 10 million New Testaments and 115.9 million Scripture “portions and selections.”
Over the past decade, UBS has distributed approximately 2.3 billion printed Scripture resources, which the organization said demonstrates a “sustained commitment to making God’s Word available to people everywhere.” Since its establishment eight decades ago, UBS reported distributing 25 billion Scripture resources, including 1.1 billion complete Bibles across 240 countries.
Digital engagement also continued to expand in 2025. Bible Society resources were downloaded 26.4 million times, while users viewed 32.2 billion Bible chapters, an increase of 13.8% from the previous year. Audio Scripture recordings were played approximately 1.4 billion times.
Regional figures showed Central and South America leading worldwide distribution of Scripture portions and selections, with nearly 98.5 million distributed across the region.
In Asia, demand remained strong for New Testaments and introductory Scripture materials, while African countries recorded more balanced growth across different forms of Bible distribution.
Print distribution was comparatively lower in Western regions, but UBS said the figures indicate that Bible engagement there is increasingly shifting toward digital platforms.
“North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Oceania accounted for comparatively smaller volumes, suggesting that Bible engagement strategies in these regions may increasingly rely on digital access rather than print distribution,” UBS said.
Language data showed that a relatively small number of languages continued to account for much of global Bible distribution. “Spanish, Portuguese, English, Mandarin, and Indonesian continued as the top five languages, reflecting both population size and active Bible engagement initiatives in those linguistic communities,” UBS said. “Swahili, French, Tagalog, and Telugu also retained their positions within the top 10, while Korean replaced Arabic in 2025.”
Together, the 10 leading languages represented 69% of worldwide full-Bible distribution, down slightly from 71.8% in 2024.
English and Spanish accounted for nearly equal shares of digital Bible chapter views in 2025, while Portuguese emerged as the leading language for Bible resource downloads.
“Within digital Bible downloads, Spanish and English rank second and third, respectively, while Portuguese leads with 62.7% of total downloads,” UBS said.
“Portuguese is third behind English and Spanish in chapter views, with approximately 5.5 billion, or 17.1% of the total globally. French, Indonesian, and Chinese also remained major languages for digital distribution, reflecting both large language populations and strong digital Bible usage.”
Spanish and Portuguese also dominated audio Bible engagement, together accounting for 72.9% of activity among the leading languages, followed by French and English, according to UBS.
