How many missions are there?
504 are currently operating, as best anyone can establish from public sources. No official page states the number, and the one that comes closest is more than a year out of date.
- Currently operating
- 504
- On the map
- 503
- New this year
- 54
- Closed, pages kept
- 149
- Records in total
- 653
Missions with a status of active today.
Boundaries drawn — 502 for operating missions and 1 for one that has since closed. Fewer than the 504 operating, because 2 have never had a territory published.
Carrying a 2026 start date in our records. The Newsroom announced 55; 1 is named differently in the two Church releases and has not been matched to a record yet.
No longer operating. Their pages remain for the people who served.
504 operating plus 149 closed.
The arithmetic
- 451 as of 31 December 2025, from the Church’s own statistics pages.
- +55 announced on 24 October 2025 and effective 1 July 2026.
- −1 if the Temple Square Mission closed before that point.
That gives 506 or 505, depending on a single date.
Why the number is not exact
Three things stop it being a single confident figure, and naming them is more useful than picking a number and sounding certain.
The official figure is frozen. The Church’s statistics pages report 31 December of the prior year and update only after April General Conference. Through most of 2026 they still say 451, which was true and is no longer.
The Temple Square date is disputed. Wikipedia’s formation table records that mission closing on 1 July 2026; other accounts put it in January. Whether it is subtracted decides between 505 and 506.
Renames are not always recorded. Missions get renamed between announcement and opening — California Oceanside opened as California Carlsbad — and a rename nobody records looks exactly like one mission too many. The same effect explains why 54 of this year’s 55 carry a 2026 date here: the announcement and the leadership release spell some names differently.
Our count of 504 is what the sources support, and it matches an independent tally of 504 built separately from the Church’s retired maps.