Dakota — #328 US boys' name

What the Data Says About Dakota

The Social Security Administration has registered 92,020 babies named Dakota between 1966 and 2024, spanning 59 consecutive years of U.S. birth records. As a boy's name, Dakota currently holds the #328 rank among boys for 2024. The name reached its historical peak in 1995, when 6,575 babies received it in a single year. Dakota is classified as unisex in SSA records: the opposite-sex variant accounts for 40,410 additional births since 1915.

Decade-level aggregation shows that Dakota performed strongest in the 1990s, accumulating 46,650 births during that ten-year window. Across the 7 decades of recorded activity, Dakota shows a clear decline from its mid-century high. Geographically, the name is most concentrated in Texas, which accounts for 6,247 births — the largest state-level total in the dataset — followed by Ohio and California. In total, SSA state-level files list Dakota in 50 of the 51 U.S. reporting jurisdictions.

No etymological entry is currently available for Dakota 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 92,020 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.