Book bans stay high
- The American Library Association reported 4,235 book challenges in 2025, the second‑highest year on record. - The ALA said roughly 40% of those challenges targeted LGBTQ+ content or books by and about people of color. - UPI, NPR, and regional outlets summarized the ALA's annual tally and demographic breakdown of the most‑challenged titles ( ).
Book challenges in U.S. libraries stayed near their recent peak in 2025, with the American Library Association counting 4,235 titles challenged. (ala.org) The American Library Association released the figure on April 20, 2026, as part of its 2026 State of America’s Libraries report. Its Office for Intellectual Freedom said 2025 was the second-highest year it has ever documented, just behind 2023’s total of 4,240. (ala.org) The group said 1,671 of the challenged titles, or 40%, were books about LGBTQIA+ people or people of color. It also logged 713 attempts to censor library materials and services in 2025, including 487 efforts aimed at books. (ala.org) The American Library Association draws a line between a challenge and a ban. A challenge is an attempt to remove or restrict a title, while a ban is a removal from a library based on objections from a person or group. (vpm.org) By that measure, the association said 5,668 books were banned from libraries in 2025, and another 920 were censored through access restrictions. The numbers show how a single complaint campaign can affect multiple copies, branches, or systems beyond the count of unique titles. (upi.com) The association said most complaints did not come from individual parents. It said 92% of book challenges came from pressure groups, government officials, and local decision-makers, up from 72% in 2024. (ala.org) NPR reported that 20.8% of challenges came from pressure groups such as Moms for Liberty, while 70.9% came from government officials and other decision-makers, including school board members and administrators. The same breakdown said only 2.7% originated with parents and 1.4% with individual library users. (vpm.org) Public libraries accounted for 51% of the 2025 challenges, and school libraries accounted for 37%, according to NPR’s summary of the report. The rest involved school curricula and higher education. (vpm.org) The most challenged title on the 2025 list was *Sold* by Patricia McCormick. Other books near the top included *The Perks of Being a Wallflower* by Stephen Chbosky, *Gender Queer: A Memoir* by Maia Kobabe, and *Empire of Storms* by Sarah J. Maas. (ala.org) Several other frequently challenged books also appeared on PEN America’s 2024-25 school book-ban report, according to NPR. The overlap shows how fights over school shelves and public library shelves are often targeting the same titles at the same time. (nprillinois.org) This year’s tally arrived at the start of National Library Week, with the American Library Association arguing that the pressure on collections is still organized and sustained. After the record set in 2023, 2025 ended only five titles short of matching it. (ala.org)
