A widely reproduced database estimate for 2020 puts Shaivas at about three hundred and eighty-five million, a little over a third of Hindus and marginally behind Vaishnavas. The usual warning applies here with more force than anywhere. There is no census of the traditions within Hinduism, the figure is modelled, and the boundary between Shaiva and Shakta practice is so porous that the two estimates cannot be treated as counting separate people. A great many Hindus who venerate Shiva also worship the Goddess as a matter of course, and would find the question of which one they belonged to an odd question.
Shaivism is strongest in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, Kashmir and Nepal, and among the Tamil population of Sri Lanka. Its major sites (the twelve jyotirlinga temples, Kashi Vishwanath at Varanasi, Chidambaram, Pashupatinath in Kathmandu, and the Amarnath and Kailash pilgrimages), anchor some of the largest movements of pilgrims on earth. The Kumbh Mela, which draws crowds counted in tens of millions, is organised around the akharas, the militant ascetic orders, and most of those are Shaiva.
Lingayats number close to sixteen million in Karnataka on the figures usually cited, and are a major political constituency there.
Kashmir Shaivism survives as a philosophical and practice tradition rather than as a community. The Kashmiri Pandit population that carried it was largely driven out of the valley from 1990, and the tradition now exists chiefly in the diaspora and among students of its texts, including a good many outside India who came to it through yoga and tantra rather than through Hinduism.