Every May the Social Security Administration drops a free, public dataset: every name given to at least five U.S. babies the year before, broken down by sex. It's the closest thing we have to ground truth on what people are actually naming their kids — names from birth certificates, not opinion polls or "trending" lists from baby-name websites.
The headlines write themselves around the #1 spots, but the more interesting story is in the movers — names climbing fast that almost nobody used a decade ago, and names declining quietly that used to be everywhere. Here's what stands out in the latest data.
The top 10 girls' names
Olivia has been #1 since 2019. Before that it was Emma for five straight years. The top of the list is sticky — the average #1 name holds the spot for about 4–5 years before being displaced.
- 1. Olivia
- 2. Emma
- 3. Charlotte
- 4. Amelia
- 5. Sophia
- 6. Mia
- 7. Isabella
- 8. Ava
- 9. Evelyn
- 10. Luna
Luna is the new arrival here — first cracked the top 50 in 2018, top 20 in 2022, top 10 in 2024. It's following the same trajectory as Aria did a few years earlier.
The top 10 boys' names
The boys' list is even stickier. Liam has been #1 since 2017, and the names directly under it have barely moved.
- 1. Liam
- 2. Noah
- 3. Oliver
- 4. Theodore
- 5. James
- 6. Henry
- 7. Mateo
- 8. Elijah
- 9. Lucas
- 10. William
Theodore is the standout — sat outside the top 100 in 2010, broke into the top 10 in 2024. The "old man name" wave (Theodore, Henry, Arthur, Walter, Hugo) has been the single biggest pattern of the last decade.
The fastest climbers
Rank movement matters more than absolute popularity. A name that jumped 200 spots tells you something about the cultural moment; a name that's been stable in the top 5 for ten years is just inertia.
Names with the largest five-year rank gains:
- Atlas — was outside the top 500 a decade ago. Now top 100. Likely benefiting from the broader "celestial / mythological" trend (Apollo, Phoenix, Orion all moving up too).
- Aurora — top 50 for the first time in 2024. The Disney effect is real but it usually lasts 2–3 years; Aurora has been climbing for 8.
- Wrenley, Wren — three-syllable nature names with a soft consonant are the dominant phonological pattern of this decade.
- Kai — short, punchy, gender-neutral. Up 60 ranks in five years on the boys' list, and now appearing in the girls' top 500 as well.
- Maeve — Irish revival names (Maeve, Saoirse, Niall) have been quietly climbing since 2019.
The fastest decliners
These were once dominant. They aren't now.
- Jennifer — #1 from 1970–1984, longer than any other name on the all-time list. Now ranked around #500 and falling. Most "Jennifer"s in the U.S. are now in their 40s and 50s.
- Michael — #1 for 38 consecutive years from 1954 to 1998 (with one break). Currently around #15. Steady decline, no obvious bottom.
- Brittany / Tiffany / Ashley — the late-80s/early-90s wave. All three have lost more than 90% of their peak share.
- Karen — fell faster than the math alone explains, almost certainly culture-driven. Now barely registers.
What "popularity" actually measures (and what it doesn't)
A note on the math, because the SSA data is widely misread.
The dataset records absolute counts — how many babies were given each name. It does not normalize by total births in that year. So when you see a chart showing "Mary peaked in 1947 with 74,000 babies," the more accurate framing is: Mary was a much bigger share of all births in 1880 than in 1947 — there were just way more babies in 1947.
This matters for two reasons:
- Old names look more "popular" than they were. The baby boom (~4M births/year) inflates the apparent peak of any name old enough to span it.
- New names look less "popular" than they are. Today's ~3.6M births/year, spread over thousands more distinct names than 1950 ever had, mean a top-10 name today represents a smaller share of all babies than a top-100 name did in 1950.
When you read "Olivia has been #1 since 2019," that's a true statement about rank. It does not mean 1-in-X babies are named Olivia at the rates Mary or John once were. The most popular name today represents about 1% of girls; the most popular name in 1880 represented closer to 7%.
Unisex names: a special case
Some names — Jordan, Taylor, Quinn, Riley, Casey, Avery — split between boys and girls. The combined rank obscures very different histories. Jordan as a boys' name peaked in 1990; Jordan as a girls' name peaked in 1997. The combined-record peak rounds to 1990 because the boys' side has higher absolute counts.
If you're looking up a unisex name and want a sex-specific peak, our calculator lets you specify it. The same is true if you're considering one for your own child — knowing the sex-specific trajectory matters more than the combined rank.
Methodology
Data: U.S. Social Security Administration national name dataset, 1880 through the most recent release. Each entry is a (name, sex, year) triple with at least 5 occurrences. The SSA suppresses lower counts for privacy, so very rare names don't appear at all.
When we say "rank movement," we mean the year-over-year change in rank within sex (girls and boys ranked separately, which is how the SSA publishes it). Rank gain is more sensitive to small absolute changes among less-common names — a name moving from rank 800 to rank 500 represents a much smaller absolute count change than a name moving from rank 5 to rank 4.
For "fastest climbers" and "fastest decliners," we're looking at five-year rank changes among names that ranked in the top 1,000 at any point in that window. Pure newcomers (names that didn't exist in the dataset five years ago) are excluded — there's no rank to compare against.
All numbers are checkable: the source files are at ssa.gov/oact/babynames, and our open-source npm package (ssa-baby-names) is the same loader that powers the calculator on this site.