Abstract Ontology-mediated query answering is an extensively studied paradigm, which aims at improving query answers with the use of a logical theory. As a form of logical entailment, ontology-mediated query answering is fully interpretable, which makes it possible to derive explanations for query answers. Surprisingly, however, explaining answers for ontologymediated queries has received little attention for ontology languages based on existential rules. In this paper, we close this gap, and study the problem of explaining query answers in terms of minimal subsets of database facts. We provide a thorough complexity analysis for several decision problems associated with minimal explanations under existential rules