How many people believe in astrology and numerology?

What 30% actually counts

When Pew surveyed 9,593 American adults in October 2024, about 30% said they consult astrology, tarot cards or a fortune teller at least once a year. 14% do it monthly, 6% weekly. Belief that the position of the stars and planets affects people’s lives sits at 27%.¹

Read the verb carefully, because the headline hangs on it. Consult covers reading your horoscope in a newsletter once, and it covers paying somebody for a reading every week. Both count as one of the 30%. A figure built on a verb that loose will always sound larger than the thing most people picture when they hear it, which is roughly a third of the country arranging its life around the stars.

The 1% the headline buried

The breakdown underneath the 30% travelled nowhere near as far as the 30% did, and it’s the part worth knowing.

One in a hundred. The picture of a population outsourcing its decisions to the stars turns out to describe almost nobody, and twice as many people are in it for fun as for helpful insights. Whatever else is true here, most people are already holding this loosely, which is worth remembering before feeling sheepish about having a favourite number.

There’s a second gap in the same figures, and it’s easy to walk past. 30% consult something; 27% believe the stars affect people’s lives; 20% say they’re mostly doing it for fun. Those groups don’t nest neatly. A meaningful share of the people consulting are, by their own account, not believing while they do it.

That combination is unusual enough to be worth naming. Most survey topics don’t have a large population that participates in a practice while declining its central claim. Here it looks like the normal case. Whatever a horoscope column or a birth-date sum is doing for the average person who reads one, the survey says it is often not functioning as a claim about the world at all.

Who it concentrates in

The practice isn’t spread evenly. Pew found 35% of women believe in astrology against 18% of men, and 43% of LGBT adults, a third of whom consult tarot against 11% of the general population.¹

Those gaps are wide enough that a national average describes almost nobody in particular. If your sense of how common this is comes from the people around you, the honest answer is that your sample is probably telling you more about your circle than about the country.

The number that hasn't moved

Belief that the stars affect people’s lives is 27% now. It was 29% in 2017.¹

Sit with that for a second. In the decade between those two readings, astrology acquired apps, birth-chart discourse, a publishing category, a merchandise economy and a permanent seat in internet culture. Measured belief went down two points, which is inside the range you’d expect from sampling noise. What grew was the visibility and the commerce, not the conviction.

That’s the single most useful figure on this page, and it cuts against the way the subject is usually written about. The “astrology boom” is a boom in supply. The demand looks much the same as it did.

Where numerology sits in all this

Pew asked about astrology, tarot and fortune tellers. It did not break numerology out as its own category, so there is no equivalent national figure for it, and anyone who quotes you one is extrapolating.¹

What can be counted is the online footprint, and there numerology is consistently the smaller sibling.²

r/numerology is comfortably the largest numerology community anywhere, and it’s still a rounding error beside astrology: 68,000 against 2.1 million. On Tumblr the gap is wider again, close to a hundred to one.

The change column holds the more interesting part. The big rooms are barely growing, and the fastest growth in the whole family belongs to angel numbers, the youngest branch of the tradition, which more than doubled in the year r/numerology grew by half. Whatever is happening here, it isn’t happening evenly, and the newest material is moving fastest.

Figures you'll see that aren't real

Go looking for these numbers yourself and you’ll meet a claim that #numerology has billions of views on TikTok. Ignore it.

The same caution applies to the confident percentages you’ll find for numerology belief specifically. Nobody has run the survey. The figure being quoted is usually Pew’s astrology number wearing a different label.

What to make of the numbers

Put together, the measurements say something fairly undramatic. A large minority of people touch this at least once a year, mostly for entertainment. A very small number lean on it hard. Belief has been flat for a decade while the commerce around it grew enormously. And numerology in particular is a small room inside a much larger house, with the newest wing filling up fastest.

None of that tells you whether any of it works. Counting how many people do a thing measures the people, not the thing, and a practice doesn’t become true by being popular or false by being niche. If that question is what brought you here, it’s a different one, and it has a longer answer.

What the numbers can do is take some pressure off. If you’ve been quietly curious about your own numbers and slightly embarrassed about it, the data says you’re in company that is mostly here for the same reason you are, and that almost nobody is handing over their decisions. That seems like the right amount of weight to give it. Is there something you’ve been curious about and haven’t looked up?