How Rare Is Your Last Name? A Look at American Surnames

First names get all the attention, but your last name has a rarity story too. It just runs on different data. Here is how American surnames stack up, and what makes them different from first names.

The data behind surnames

Surname rarity comes from the U.S. Census Bureau 2010 surname file, a public snapshot that counts 265,667,228 people across 162,253 last names. Unlike the first-name data, which is 145 years of births, this is a single picture of the living population, which makes it a cleaner read on how common a family name is today.

The most common American surnames

Rank	Surname	People	Rarity
1	Smith	2,442,977	1 in 109
2	Johnson	1,932,812	1 in 137
3	Williams	1,625,252	1 in 163
4	Brown	1,437,026	1 in 185
5	Jones	1,425,470	1 in 186
6	Garcia	1,166,120	1 in 228
7	Miller	1,161,437	1 in 229
8	Davis	1,116,357	1 in 238

Smith leads, shared by nearly 2.5 million Americans, about 1 in every 109 people. Garcia at number 6 is a good marker of how the country's names have shifted, now more common than long-standing names like Miller and Davis.

First names vs last names

The rarity idea is identical for both: how many people share it, turned into a "1 in X" figure and a tier. Two differences are worth knowing.

• The source. First names come from birth records back to 1880. Surnames come from the 2010 census of living people.
• The floor. The surname file only lists names held by at least 100 people. Rarer family names are grouped together, so if yours is not listed, it is carried by fewer than 100 Americans.

Check yours

Your full name is really two rarity scores. See where your family name lands with the Surname Rarity Checker, then run your first name too. Together they tell you just how unlikely the whole combination is.