SSA name rankings
Baby Name Rankings
Names ranked by popularity, decade-by-decade growth, and gender balance — every list built from U.S. Social Security Administration birth records since 1880.
- James
- All-time #1
- 6
- Ranking lists
- 1880–2024
- Years covered
According to the U.S. Social Security Administration, more than 104,800 distinct names have been recorded across 145 years of national birth data (1880–2024). These rankings cut that record six ways — the most popular boys' and girls' names of the 2020s, the fastest risers, the most gender-neutral picks, and the all-time leaders — each one computed directly from the federal files rather than editorial opinion. See the methodology for how each list is built and the five-birth disclosure floor the agency applies.
All-time most popular US baby names
Total births recorded across every year on the SSA national file (1880–2024)
- James
James
5,238,570 births
- John
John
5,174,470 births
- Robert
Robert
4,845,891 births
- Michael
Michael
4,418,526 births
- William
William
4,189,004 births
- Mary
Mary
4,139,160 births
- David
David
3,669,730 births
- Joseph
Joseph
2,662,040 births
What this shows A handful of mid-century classics banked enormous lifetime totals by staying popular across many decades — the kind of longevity that even the biggest single-decade hits rarely match.
Top Boy Names — 2020s
Most popular boy names of the 2020s decade by total births.
Top Girl Names — 2020s
Most popular girl names of the 2020s decade by total births.
Fastest Rising Girl Names
Girl names with the biggest growth between 2013 and 2023.
Fastest Rising Boy Names
Boy names with the biggest growth between 2013 and 2023.
Most Gender-Neutral Names
Names used nearly equally for boys and girls with 5,000+ uses each.
About these rankings
How these rankings are compiled
Every list on this page is computed directly from the U.S. Social Security Administration's public baby-name files — not editorially curated. The popularity rankings sum births for each name and order them with a deterministic ROW_NUMBER so ties break consistently; the fastest-rising lists compare each name's recent birth count to five years earlier; the gender-neutral list surfaces names given to boys and girls in similar numbers. Every figure is visible on the individual name page so you can verify it, and the lists refresh whenever the SSA releases new data.
What a ranking means (and what it doesn't)
A name's rank reflects one thing only: how many parents chose it. It is not a measure of how "good," beautiful, or successful a name is. A top-10 name is simply common; a name ranked 800th is simply rarer. Many parents deliberately seek out lower-ranked names for exactly that reason. Where a list could be misread — for example, "fastest rising" rewards momentum, not absolute popularity — we say so directly on the page.
Why we publish them
A century and a half of naming data is hard to navigate as a raw table. Most parents arrive with a question — what's popular now, what's climbing, what feels distinctive — and a ranked, linked list is the fastest way to answer it. We surface the underlying counts, link to the official SSA source, and avoid spin so you can draw your own conclusions.
Sources & corrections
All rankings derive from the SSA national and state name files documented on our methodology page. We blend no proprietary signals and substitute no editorial opinion for the data. If you believe a ranking is miscomputed, email us via the contact page with the specific name and we'll review it on the next refresh.