How Rare Is My Name?

What this tells you

Type a name and you get one honest number: how many people share it. We read the U.S. Social Security Administration's public record of every name given to a baby from 1880 through 2024. That is 372,009,150 births across 104,819 different first names. Your rarity is simply how your name stacks up against all of them.

A name like James sits at the very top, so about 1 in 71 people share it. A name given to only a few hundred babies in 145 years lands in the millions, like 1 in 2 million. Both are fun to know, and both make a card worth sharing.

The Name Rarity Card

Every result builds a card you can save with one tap: the name, its rarity tier, the "1 in X" figure, its all-time U.S. rank, and a bar for every decade since 1880 so you can watch it rise and fall. Post it, text it, or drop it in a group chat and ask the obvious question back: how rare is yours?

How the tiers work

We sort every name into six tiers by how many people carry it.

Tier	How many share the name
Very Common	more than 1 in 200 people
Common	about 1 in 200 to 1 in 2,000
Uncommon	about 1 in 2,000 to 1 in 20,000
Rare	about 1 in 20,000 to 1 in 200,000
Very Rare	about 1 in 200,000 to 1 in 2 million
Ultra Rare	rarer than 1 in 2 million

Most people land in Common or Very Common, which is its own kind of fun. If you score Rare or Ultra Rare, that badge is earned.

Where the numbers come from

First names use the SSA national baby-name data, which is public domain and covers 1880 to 2024. Last names use the U.S. Census Bureau 2010 surname file, which counts 266 million people across 162,253 surnames. If you want to check your last name specifically, the surname rarity checker runs the same lookup against that file. The SSA only lists a name once at least 5 babies get it in a year, so genuinely tiny names show up as "too rare to count," which is a flex of its own.

One honest note: these are counts of recorded names, not a headcount of people alive today. Someone named in 1920 is counted the same as someone named last year. That makes the rarity ranking fair and stable, but it is a names figure, not a census of the living.

Everything runs in your browser. The name you type never leaves your device.

How many people have my name

This is the same question as rarity, asked the other way round, and it is the one most people actually type. The tool answers it directly: enter a name and you get the total number of times it has been recorded, its all-time rank, and the "1 in X" figure that follows from both.

Here is what that looks like for names across the whole range, from the dataset itself.

Name	Times recorded	All-time rank	Roughly
James	5,262,396	1	1 in 71
Michael	4,440,391	4	1 in 84
Mary	4,154,332	6	1 in 90
Jennifer	1,476,028	19	1 in 252
Ashley	873,844	55	1 in 426
Olivia	554,445	115	1 in 671
Liam	338,059	221	1 in 1,100
Nevaeh	97,030	708	1 in 3,834
Zelda	16,411	2,060	1 in 22,668

Read the gap between the top and the bottom of that table and the scale becomes clear. James has been recorded more than three hundred times as often as Zelda. Both are names people have heard of.

Most names are rarer than people expect

Three numbers from the file explain why almost everyone is surprised by their result.

Only 13 names out of 104,819 are carried by more than 1 in 200 people. Being "common" is much narrower than it feels. If your name is not one of a very short list, it is already rarer than the word common suggests.

The top 100 names account for 34.4% of every birth on record. A third of the country is named from a list you could read in two minutes. The other two thirds are spread across the remaining 104,719 names.

70.8% of all recorded names are rarer than 1 in 2 million. Most entries in the file are names given to a handful of babies in a single year and rarely again. That is the long tail, and it is where the majority of distinct names live even though very few people are in it.

Put together: a small number of names cover a large share of people, and a very large number of names cover almost nobody. If you land somewhere in the middle you are in a smaller group than you would guess.

Why your name's rank moves over time

A name's all-time rank is one number, but the decade bars on your card usually tell a better story. Names rise and fall in waves, and the shape of the wave says something about when a person was probably named.

Some names are steady across a century. Others spike hard and fade, which is why a name can feel everywhere to one generation and unfamiliar to the next. Jennifer sits at rank 19 all-time almost entirely on the strength of a few decades. Nevaeh barely existed before the 2000s and then climbed fast.

That is also why an all-time rank and a "how popular is it right now" answer are different questions. The card shows both: the lifetime figure, and the decade bars that show where the name actually sat when.

First names and last names are counted differently

Worth knowing before you compare the two results, because they come from separate files.

First names come from the Social Security Administration's national baby-name record, 372,009,150 births from 1880 to 2024, across 104,819 names. It counts naming events over 145 years.

Last names come from the Census Bureau's 2010 surname file, which counts 265,667,228 people across 162,253 surnames. It is a snapshot of living people at one moment.

So a first-name rarity and a surname rarity are both honest, but they are not measuring quite the same thing, and you should not multiply them together to work out how rare your full name is. If you want the surname figure on its own, the surname rarity checker runs against the Census file.

One more limitation to keep in mind. The SSA only publishes a name for a given year once at least five babies received it. Names below that threshold are real but unlisted, so a genuinely tiny name can come back as too rare to count rather than with a number.