The San Jose California Temple — one of California’s 12 temples in various stages for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — has been renamed the Sunnyvale California Temple by the First Presidency.
This updated name reflects its planned location of Sunnyvale, California, a Bay Area suburb west of San Jose.
Information about this change was first published in a Dec. 15 news release on ChurchofJesusChrist.org.
As previously announced, the Sunnyvale temple will be a single-story building of approximately 30,000 square feet. The edifice will stand on a 4.73-acre site at 771 W. Fremont Ave. in Sunnyvale, with an accompanying distribution center also planned for the site.
The future location of the Sunnyvale California Temple, formerly named the San Jose California Temple. | The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
About the Sunnyvale temple and the Church in California
On April 2, 2023, Church President Russell M. Nelson announced a house of the Lord for San Jose, California. It was one of 15 temples announced in April 2023 general conference, alongside a temple for Bakersfield, California.
Eight Latter-day Saint temples have been dedicated in California; these are the Los Angeles (dedicated in 1956), Oakland (1964), San Diego (1993), Fresno (2000), Redlands (2003), Newport Beach (2005), Sacramento (2006) and Feather River (2023) temples.
Of note, the San Diego temple was temporarily closed in July 2023 and is currently undergoing extensive renovations.
Two California houses of the Lord are under construction — in Yorba Linda, after a June 2022 groundbreaking, and in Modesto, after an October 2023 groundbreaking.
That leaves the Sunnyvale and Bakersfield temples, both announced in April 2023, as the state’s two in planning stages.
Latter-day Saints first arrived in California on July 31, 1846, in what was Yerba Buena. The company of around 230 people tripled the population of Yerba Buena and helped build it into the prosperous city of San Francisco.
On July 6, 1851, the San Bernardino Stake was organized as California’s first. Eight California stakes were created in the 1930s, five in the 1940s, and 30 in the 1950s.
Today, California is home to nearly 730,000 Church members in almost 1,100 congregations. This makes it the second U.S. state with the most Latter-day Saints, after Utah.
On Oct. 24, the Church announced 55 new missions will be created July 1, 2026. Three of them will be for California — the Oceanside, Ontario and Victorville missions.
