Harper — #12 US unisex name

What the Data Says About Harper

The Social Security Administration has registered 132,214 babies named Harper between 1971 and 2024, spanning 54 consecutive years of U.S. birth records. As a girl's name, Harper currently holds the #12 rank among girls for 2024. The name reached its historical peak in 2016, when 10,802 babies received it in a single year. Harper is classified as unisex in SSA records: the opposite-sex variant accounts for 6,692 additional births since 1881.

Decade-level aggregation shows that Harper performed strongest in the 2010s, accumulating 85,180 births during that ten-year window. Across the 6 decades of recorded activity, Harper shows notable generational variation in parental adoption. Geographically, the name is most concentrated in Texas, which accounts for 10,599 births — the largest state-level total in the dataset — followed by California and Ohio. In total, SSA state-level files list Harper in 51 of the 51 U.S. reporting jurisdictions.

No etymological entry is currently available for Harper 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 132,214 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.