Kelly — #869 US unisex name

What the Data Says About Kelly

The Social Security Administration has registered 473,641 babies named Kelly between 1907 and 2024, spanning 118 consecutive years of U.S. birth records. As a girl's name, Kelly currently holds the #869 rank among girls for 2024. The name reached its historical peak in 1977, when 18,234 babies received it in a single year. Kelly is classified as unisex in SSA records: the opposite-sex variant accounts for 82,317 additional births since 1880.

Decade-level aggregation shows that Kelly performed strongest in the 1970s, accumulating 133,548 births during that ten-year window. Across the 13 decades of recorded activity, Kelly shows a clear decline from its mid-century high. Geographically, the name is most concentrated in California, which accounts for 47,469 births — the largest state-level total in the dataset — followed by New York and Pennsylvania. In total, SSA state-level files list Kelly in 51 of the 51 U.S. reporting jurisdictions.

No etymological entry is currently available for Kelly 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 473,641 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.