Riley — #42 US unisex name

What the Data Says About Riley

The Social Security Administration has registered 137,477 babies named Riley between 1923 and 2024, spanning 102 consecutive years of U.S. birth records. As a girl's name, Riley currently holds the #42 rank among girls for 2024. The name reached its historical peak in 2016, when 7,159 babies received it in a single year. Riley is classified as unisex in SSA records: the opposite-sex variant accounts for 103,344 additional births since 1880.

Decade-level aggregation shows that Riley performed strongest in the 2010s, accumulating 56,140 births during that ten-year window. Across the 11 decades of recorded activity, Riley shows notable generational variation in parental adoption. Geographically, the name is most concentrated in California, which accounts for 13,487 births — the largest state-level total in the dataset — followed by Texas and New York. In total, SSA state-level files list Riley in 51 of the 51 U.S. reporting jurisdictions.

No etymological entry is currently available for Riley 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 137,477 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.