WHAT WAS CLAIMED
"Christian" has been removed as a category of religious affiliation that respondents can select on the 2026 census form.
OUR VERDICT
False. "Christian" has never been a tick-box option on the form.
AAP FACTCHECK - It is being falsely claimed that "Christian" has been removed as a category from the list of religions on the 2026 census.
Christianity has never been listed as a single tick-box option on the census.
The form lists the nine most populous religions in the country, including specific Christian denominations such as Catholic, Anglican and Uniting Church, along with a "no religion" option.
Adherents to "other" faiths, including respondents identifying as "Christian", can write their religion in the free text field.
One post claims Christianity has been removed as a category from the census and features an image of the form's religion question with "Christian" written in the "other" field.
"Why have they removed the category CHRISTIAN from the census?" the post reads.
The image appears to be a screenshot of a post circulating among Facebook users, which urges people to write their religion as "Christian" on the form.
However, the religious affiliation question remains the same as it was in the previous census in 2021.
In the sample 2026 census form, the 10 tick-box options are no religion, Catholic, Anglican, Islam, Hinduism, Uniting Church, Buddhism, Presbyterian, Greek Orthodox and Baptist (Question 24, page 10).
The same list of 10 options was included in the 2021 census (Question 23, p10).
Historical census forms going back to 1996 are published on the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) website.
None of those forms includes "Christianity" as a standalone option in the list of religions.
Census data from before 1996 also shows Christian respondents were asked to provide details of their specific denomination.
The ABS confirmed the listed religions are determined by the most common responses to the previous census.
"Tick-box options in the 2026 census are based on the most common mutually exclusive responses from 2021," a spokesperson told AAP FactCheck.
"Including Christianity as a tick box would result in a loss of information on the specific Christian denominations, such as Catholic and Anglican," the spokesperson said.
However, the ABS does include an aggregate count of all types of Christianity in published census data.
Christianity was the most common religion in Australia in 2021, with 43.9 per cent of people identifying as Christian in that year's census, according to census data available on the ABS website.
Around 11.1 million people nominated Christianity as their religion in the 2021 census, according to ABS data (Table 1).
That was down from 12.2 million people, or around 52 per cent, who identified as Christian in the 2016 census, the data shows.
Catholicism was the largest single religious affiliation category, accounting for around 20 per cent of all census respondents in 2021 and 23 per cent in 2016 (Table 3).
The first census to include a tick-box list alongside a free-text option was in 1991, according to the ABS website.
The religion question is one of only two optional questions on the form - the other being whether the respondent agrees to their information being kept by the National Archives of Australia and made public after 99 years.
The optional nature of the religion question is mandated by section 14(3) of the Census and Statistics Act (1905).
AAP Factcheck previously debunked several false claims about the survey ahead of census night on Tuesday, August 11.
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