How Hinduism and Sikhism became two of Australia’s fastest growing faiths

On the night of the 2021 Census, 684,002 people in Australia recorded their religion as Hindu, and about 210,400 recorded it as Sikh. Five years earlier those figures had stood at 440,300 and 125,900. Two traditions carried to Australia largely by migrants from India and Nepal had become among the fastest growing faiths in the country, at a moment when the census counted fewer Christians and more people of no religion than at any time in its recorded past.

The numbers behind the growth

The Australian Bureau of Statistics released the 2021 Census religion results in June 2022. Hinduism had grown by 55.3 per cent since 2016 to reach 684,002 people, or 2.7 per cent of the population. In absolute terms that was the largest increase of any non-Christian religion, close to 243,700 additional people in five years. Sikhism grew at a faster rate again. It reached 210,400 people, or 0.8 per cent of the population, up by about 84,500 since 2016, and the ABS noted that the number identifying with Sikhism had almost tripled since the 2011 Census. Both faiths sit inside a broader group the bureau calls “other religions”, which passed 2.5 million people in 2021, an increase of 617,800 in five years, and which has risen from 3.5 per cent of the population in 1996 to about 10 per cent in 2021.

Dr David Gruen, the Australian Statistician, presented the data as a sign of long-run change rather than a one-year surprise. “Census religion data shows a characteristic of Australia that has changed significantly over the past two decades,” he said. He pointed out that religion is the only voluntary question on the Census, and one of a handful asked at nearly every count, yet the share of people who answered it rose from 91 per cent in 2016 to 93 per cent in 2021. The bureau stopped short of naming any single faith the fastest growing. In strict proportional terms the sharpest jump belonged to a very small community, the Yezidi, whose numbers grew from a few dozen to a few thousand after refugee resettlement. Measured among the larger religions, though, Hinduism and Sikhism were the clear front runners.

A less Christian, less religious majority

The rise of these faiths reads differently against the wider results. Christianity fell from 52.1 per cent of the population in 2016 to 43.9 per cent in 2021, a decline of more than one million people in five years. For the first time, an Australian census recorded fewer than half of the population as Christian. People reporting no religion climbed from 30.1 per cent to 38.9 per cent, close to 9.9 million people, and they now form the single largest group on the religion question, ahead of Catholics.

Hinduism and Sikhism therefore grew while the country’s long-dominant faith contracted and secular identification surged. Their combined share remains modest, and the ABS has been careful to say that other religions together still account for about one in ten Australians. The direction of travel, though, is steady, and the census points to settlement rather than conversion as the reason.

Migration is the engine

The census makes the source of the growth plain. India was the second most common country of birth for people born overseas in 2021, with 673,352 India-born residents, behind England and ahead of China. Nepal recorded the fastest growth of any sizeable migrant group. The number of Nepal-born residents rose by about 67,752, or close to 124 per cent, in five years, an increase that reporting by SBS described as making Nepalis the fastest growing migrant community in the country.

Language data tells the same story. Punjabi became the fifth most widely spoken language other than English, with about 239,000 speakers, an increase of roughly 80 per cent since 2016, and the ABS recorded that more than 209,000 of those speakers identified as Sikh. Hindi and Nepali speakers make up large shares of the Hindu population in turn. The pattern is consistent across every measure: families arriving from South Asia, settling, having children and building institutions. These faiths are growing because the communities that practise them are young and still forming households, so the census captures a first and second generation being counted together for the first time.

Temples, gurdwaras and the signs on the ground

The change is visible in brick, marble and steel. Encyclopaedic tallies and community directories count more than forty Hindu temples across Australia, and a resource list compiled by Sikh Youth Australia recorded about 32 gurdwaras, spread across New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and the Australian Capital Territory.

Some of these institutions are old. The Sikh community at Woolgoolga, a town of roughly 5,000 people about 550 kilometres north of Sydney, traces its roots to Punjabi men who reached Australia from the 1890s and later took up work on the region’s banana plantations during the Second World War. As families followed after Indian independence in 1947, the community built the country’s first Sikh temple at the end of the 1960s, followed by the Guru Nanak Sikh Temple around 1970. The town became known as a small piece of Punjab on the New South Wales coast, its growers moving from labouring into land ownership and, later, into blueberry farming. Its two gurdwaras remain a landmark of the earliest organised Indian settlement in the country, and they anchor a heritage that predates the recent surge by more than a century.

Others are new and ambitious. At Kemps Creek in Sydney’s south-west, near the new Western Sydney Airport, the BAPS Swaminarayan organisation has been building a Hindu mandir complex on a 25-acre site. Its first stage, a cultural centre, was completed and inaugurated in early 2025, and the site features a 15-metre statue of Nilkanth Varni, a youthful form of Bhagwan Swaminarayan, described as the tallest metal statue in Australia. The land was chosen by the movement’s spiritual head, Mahant Swami Maharaj, during a visit in 2015, and the wider temple is being funded by volunteers and donors from the Hindu community. The project shows how a faith that barely registered on the census a generation ago now commissions permanent architecture on the edge of the country’s largest city.

Community organisations have grown alongside the buildings. The Hindu Council of Australia, established in 1998, acts as a national representative body. It speaks for Hindu organisations to federal, state and local governments, runs festivals and exhibitions, supports youth programmes and takes part in interfaith dialogue. Bodies such as the Australian Sikh Association and various state Sikh councils play a similar organising role for gurdwaras, langar kitchens and welfare work. These groups translate raw census growth into schools, aged-care conversations, disaster-relief drives and a public voice, the ordinary infrastructure of a settled religious community.

What the shift means for the diaspora and the country

For Indian-Australians and Nepali-Australians, the census confirms something already felt in daily life. Their traditions now sit within the mainstream of Australian religious life, counted in the hundreds of thousands, taught to a second generation and served by temples and gurdwaras in most major cities. That visibility brings practical questions about religious holidays, chaplaincy, cremation facilities, school curricula and political representation, all of which tend to follow once a community reaches a certain size.

For Australia, the 2021 figures mark a wider rebalancing of religious life. A Christian majority has given way to a plurality in which the largest single answer is no religion, and in which Hindu, Sikh, Muslim and Buddhist Australians together form a growing minority. Migration from South Asia looks set to keep shaping that pattern for years to come, since the communities driving it are young and still forming families. The census cannot say what any of this will mean for belief or belonging in the long term. What it does record, with unusual clarity, is a country whose religious make-up now looks more like the region it sits in.