Carmen — #416 US unisex name

What the Data Says About Carmen

The Social Security Administration has registered 141,984 babies named Carmen between 1881 and 2024, spanning 144 consecutive years of U.S. birth records. As a girl's name, Carmen currently holds the #416 rank among girls for 2024. The name reached its historical peak in 1960, when 2,439 babies received it in a single year. Carmen is classified as unisex in SSA records: the opposite-sex variant accounts for 16,857 additional births since 1894.

Decade-level aggregation shows that Carmen performed strongest in the 1960s, accumulating 22,885 births during that ten-year window. Across the 15 decades of recorded activity, Carmen shows a clear decline from its mid-century high. Geographically, the name is most concentrated in California, which accounts for 21,509 births — the largest state-level total in the dataset — followed by New York and Texas. In total, SSA state-level files list Carmen in 51 of the 51 U.S. reporting jurisdictions.

No etymological entry is currently available for Carmen in our reference dataset. These figures derive from SSA's annual national and state-level name files, which include any name appearing at least five times in a given year or state-year; names below that threshold are suppressed for privacy and therefore excluded from the totals shown here. The 141,984 total represents a lower bound — actual usage may be higher in years or states where the count fell below the disclosure floor. This page is provided for informational and research purposes only and does not constitute personal, legal, or naming advice.