Surge in Amish population growth is reshaping rural Missouri

Ashlea Cardin is an occupational therapist in southern Missouri, where many of her clients are Amish children.

Recently, one of her patients died, and the family asked her to attend the viewing.

“I drove out there, and I had never seen so many horse and buggies,” Cardin said.

Likewise, Katie Broeker, who owns a farm stand in Washington, Missouri, has noticed an Amish population surge in her area.

Much of the produce Broeker sells comes from the Clark Produce Auction, held twice a week from May to October.

“I’ve seen more communities throughout the state than I ever did,” she said.

Decadeslong migration has made Missouri one of the nation’s most attractive locations for Amish families looking for affordable land and room to grow.

In 1992, the estimated Amish population was 128,000, with 3,745 living in Missouri.

Amish numbers today have grown to more than 404,000 nationally, and Missouri’s growth has been even faster.

According to the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, an estimated 18,375 Amish lived in Missouri in 2025. That’s an increase of 393% compared with the national growth rate of about 216%.

Steve Nolt, the director of the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, said that despite slight variations in average Amish family growth between states, “I think a lot of that greater rate is because of migration.”

Twenty-one new Amish settlements have been established in Missouri since 2015, the most in the nation.

“They share what they call mutual aid, helping one another with medical bills and things like that, but every family is economically independent,” Nolt said.

Settlements are defined by Amish who live close to one another, he said. Because they hold their church services in a community member’s house, when a new settlement is established, the homes must be within horse-and-buggy distance. As settlements expand, more church districts are added.

“Getting larger over time is not necessarily in conflict with the idea of being within buggy-driving distance for Sunday morning,” Nolt said, “because as a settlement gets larger, they just create a second or third or fourth church district within that settlement.”

Missouri as a magnet

Missouri is now the seventh most populous state for the Amish in the United States. The trend has been fueled by inexpensive farmland, fewer land-use regulations and room for expanding families.

The four largest settlements are spread throughout the state: Seymour is in the south, with 4,325 Amish; Clark is central, with an Amish population of 1,730; Jamesport is in the northwest, with 1,090 Amish; and Spickard is in the north, with 645 Amish.

Seymour also ranks as the 10th most populous settlement in the country.

Amish are flocking to Missouri from Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana to escape economic epicenters and church districts whose practices no longer align with their beliefs, to have more land to expand on and numerous other reasons, said Caroline Brock, an associate professor at the University of Missouri and an Amish lifestyle expert.

The absence of zoning regulations in rural Missouri, coupled with land affordability, large areas of for-sale land and religious preferences are driving the population growth in the state.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the average price of farmland in Missouri is $5,000 per acre, far less than that of other neighboring states. Land in Illinois averages $8,930 per acre, and it costs $9,790 per acre in Iowa.

The real estate taxes in Missouri are also lower than many other states like Pennsylvania and Ohio. This likely contributes to the decision to move to Missouri, Nolt said.

Brock said the Amish population tends to cluster in the Midwest and the Northeast. Fertile, affordable land draws many Amish to Missouri rather than other Midwestern states.

Many of the Amish are leaving Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which has the largest population in the country, because there is no room to grow. Its proximity to Philadelphia, an urban environment, offers too many modern conveniences, fast-paced lifestyles and distractions.

Having large areas that are undeveloped with few regulations can be beneficial for new Amish settlements expecting significant growth over time. Many Missouri counties do not have zoning regulations, which means those looking to construct new buildings are not restricted to a specific geographical district.

These relaxed regulations can be attractive to Amish settlements because they can then build homes, barns, storefronts and schools closer together without worrying about zoning compliance.

“Eventually, they kind of max out the land in a contiguous area,” Brock said.

Staying together

When Amish people are considering moving, Nolt said they will look for areas with plenty of available plots of land in proximity to one another so numerous families can establish themselves near each other.

“These are all what we might call ad hoc efforts, so it’s people who know each other, it’s friends,” Nolt said. “Families are making decisions about moving, you know, in concert with one another.”

Amish communities are also being established in Missouri because of ideological differences among their local churches.

Amish churches are quite specific and contained, with services held in a community member’s home or barn, so the congregation must remain small. The highest church official is a bishop who presides over a church district, and there is no overarching Amish church leader.

According to Brock, many Amish migrants move because they don’t think their local churches are conservative enough.

“I think it’s just that (Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana are) are more established, and they’re some of those bigger places that are sort of ‘less conservative’ by my definition, probably because they’re closer to urban centers,” she said.

More conservative Amish people likely move to Missouri in hopes of having a quieter lifestyle, which has a higher degree of separation from urban-English life, she said.

Economic connections

Amish-owned businesses and skilled trades have become a familiar part of everyday life in many rural Missouri communities.

At the biweekly auction in Clark, Amish and non-Amish buyers move together through the crowd, bidding on the same produce and stopping to chat between sales.

“The Amish people are not entirely self-sufficient,” Nolt said. “So they’re shopping at stores that are non-Amish-owned stores, and if they’re farming, they’re probably using the services of a veterinarian who’s not Amish but someone from the area.”

As the Amish population grows, local officials say the shift is becoming visible in both demographics and business activity.

“We have had a growth of Amish-owned businesses going up,” said Aaron Piburn, the assessor the Daviess County, home to Jamesport, the largest Old Order Amish settlement west of the Mississippi River with roughly 150 families.

That growth is reflected in county-level data. Daviess County has the third highest Amish population in the state and has seen a 10% increase over the last five years — changes that local officials say are increasingly visible in everyday work and services across the region.

“There are quite a few Amish people that help on construction or providing pretty affordable roof repair and things like that for hail damage,” Brock said. “In Columbia you might even see some of them.”

Signs in Clark hang from mailboxes that advertise fresh eggs, heads of cabbage and even rabbits. Custom cabinets, tarps, quilts and leather goods are also available.

“A lot of times people don’t fully understand how they’re contributing to the local communities,” Brock said.

Those relationships often grow beyond business transactions. For some non-Amish professionals, years of working with Amish families have turned into lasting, reciprocal relationships.

“I’m giving them my time and experience, and they’re sharing their child or their time or their baked goods or their butchering day meats or whatever with me,” Ashlea Cardin said. “I take care of their family, and they take care of mine.”

Future growth

Recently, when Cardin went to see a patient, she was introduced to a new baby.

“The grandparent proudly said, ‘This is number 78 for me.’”

Brock said that Amish communities double every 20 years because of high retention rates and birth rates. Amish families have, on average, six to eight children.

As families grow, so does the need for land. Cardin said she’s watched families leave established settlements to create new ones across Missouri and neighboring states.

Because Amish children are not required to attend school after the eighth grade, they spend a lot of time with their family.

Amish communities are also setting up more private, single-room school buildings so they don’t need to send their children to public schools where, they believe, influences could be negative.

“Lots of things happen in high school, very formative things,” Brock said. “Lots of social pressures and things like that.”

That is certainly another reason the Amish population continues to grow with little sign of slowing.

As land becomes scarcer and more expensive in traditional Amish states, researchers say the combination of affordable farmland, rural communities and limited zoning means Missouri is likely to remain one of the nation’s primary destinations for new Amish settlements.

The result is a quiet but steady reshaping of parts of rural Missouri— one family, one farm and one new settlement at a time.

“Places like Missouri (will) continue to, I think, be persistently of interest to the Amish population,” Nolt said.