How many women actually wear niqab?
Far fewer than the political debate assumes. Denmark's own count found about 150 niqab-wearers nationwide. Cross-national preference surveys put niqab or burqa as the preferred public dress for a median of one in ten respondents, ranging from three-quarters in Saudi Arabia to under 3% in Turkey.
This page does not draw on the fiqh survey used elsewhere on this site, which does not attempt a count. It is a separate, externally sourced answer to a question the political debate raises constantly and rarely answers with a number.
The honest starting point
No country has a reliable census of niqab-wearers, and most never will: it is not a category governments record, and the women concerned have reason not to volunteer to be counted. What follows are the closest things to real data that exist, not a substitute for a census that does not exist.
The one country that actually tried to count
Denmark's government commissioned the University of Copenhagen to estimate the number ahead of its 2018 ban, the first serious attempt at this in any European country. Using stratified sampling, key informants and location sampling to reach a small and elusive population, the study's estimate was around 150 niqab-wearers nationwide (range 100–200). Separately, only about 3 women were found wearing the full burqa. Of the niqab-wearers, 60 to 80 were Danish converts to Islam, a detail that cuts against the assumption that niqab in Europe is an import worn only by migrants.
Elsewhere in Europe
No other European country has attempted a comparably rigorous count. For the UK, with a Muslim population of roughly four million, there is no census or large survey; estimates in UK reporting and expert commentary converge on "hundreds, or low thousands," which is a wide range but the best that exists. Treat any more precise-sounding figure for the UK, or for other European countries without a Denmark-style study, as an unverified estimate rather than a count.
A different kind of signal from Southeast Asia
Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim-majority country, has no Denmark-style count either, but there is a scale indicator of a different kind: Niqab Squad, a community for niqab-wearing women founded by Indadari in 2016, has over 44,000 followers on its official account and has been registered as a foundation with Indonesia's Ministry of Law and Human Rights since October 2018. It runs counselling, social service, education and economic-support programmes, and states its own purpose as pushing back against the stereotype that niqab-wearing women are rigid or withdrawn.
A follower count is not a count of wearers — it includes supporters and the merely curious — but a registered organisation of that size points to a real, sizeable community of niqab-wearing women in Indonesia, on a different scale altogether from the hundreds counted in Denmark.
In Muslim-majority countries: preference, not prevalence
The most useful cross-national data here does not measure how many women wear niqab — it measures what people say is appropriate, which is a different question. A University of Michigan Institute for Social Research survey across seven countries, shown to respondents as a set of illustrated dress options and widely reported via Pew Research, asked which was most appropriate for a woman in public:
| Country | Preferred niqab or burqa |
|---|---|
| Saudi Arabia | ~74% (63% niqab, 11% burqa) |
| Pakistan | roughly a third |
| Egypt, Iraq | roughly one in ten or fewer |
| Turkey, Lebanon, Tunisia | 3% or under |
The median across all seven countries was about 10%. Saudi Arabia was the outlier by a wide margin; everywhere else, a face-covered style was a minority preference, and in several countries a small one.
Read this table for what it is: a preference survey, not a count of how women actually dress. Preference and practice diverge, in both directions.
What this should correct
Two opposite misreadings, and this page exists to close off both. Niqab is not the marginal, almost-imaginary practice European ban debates sometimes imply the numbers make it. Denmark's own count, small as it is, is of real women, not a rounding error invented to justify restriction. It is also not the widespread practice the same debates sometimes imply by treating niqab and hijab as interchangeable — across every country measured here, the number of women who cover the face specifically is a minority within a minority.
Sources. Counting Niqabs and Burqas in Denmark — University of Copenhagen · Pew Research Center — How people in Muslim countries prefer women to dress in public · Channel 4 FactCheck — Britain's Niqab · IDN Times — Niqab Squad