Top 10 All-Time Most Popular US Female Baby Names

NameAlmanac ranks the most popular US female baby names recorded by the Social Security Administration since 1880, using total cumulative count across all years of the public SSA Baby Names release.

Research period:

Compiled by NameAlmanac Editorial on 2026-06-08

Research question

Across nearly 150 years of recorded US births, which female given names accumulate the highest cumulative totals, and how does the female top-10 compare in concentration and tenure to the male top-10?

Methodology

Every number on this page is pulled live from NameAlmanac's current dataset at the moment you load it, ranked from highest to lowest and limited to the top 10. Nothing here is a hardcoded or cached figure: when the underlying Baby Names from Social Security Card Applications, National Data dataset is refreshed, this page reflects the new numbers automatically.

Values are shown in the units and precision published by the U.S. Social Security Administration. Counts are preserved with standard thousand-separators. Records with a missing or zero value on the ranking metric are excluded rather than shown as artificial zeros.

The Social Security Administration publishes the Baby Names from Social Security Card Applications, National Data on its own release schedule; when a new release lands, NameAlmanac updates this ranking automatically without any change to this page. If the agency later revises a published value, the revision flows through the same way. See the methodology page for the full source vintage and refresh history.

Outliers are shown as published, not silently smoothed or clipped, so readers can judge them in context via the source link. Where the source changes its reporting scope between releases, we note it on the methodology page rather than blending incompatible vintages into one ranking.

NameAlmanac maintains an editorial standards process for how rankings are built, how outliers are handled, and how disputed values are corrected. The byline at the top of this page names the editorial owner accountable for its framing. Every figure traces back to the original Social Security Administration record via the citation below, so independent verification never requires anything beyond the public source. Corrections, takedowns, or clarifications can be requested through the contact channels in the site footer.

Top 10 All-Time Most Popular US Female Baby Names

Live data, updates automatically when the source dataset is refreshed

births

What this shows Cumulative all-time totals favor names that stayed popular across many decades, so long-running classics outrank recent trend names.

Source U.S. Social Security Administration

The ranked top 10

Every row below reflects NameAlmanac's current dataset (10 rows shown). When the source is refreshed, this table updates automatically.

# Name All-time total births Peak year Peak-year births
1 Mary 4,141,481 1921 73,984
2 Elizabeth 1,688,757 1990 20,750
3 Patricia 1,573,623 1951 56,446
4 Jennifer 1,471,703 1972 63,600
5 Linda 1,455,143 1947 99,692
6 Barbara 1,436,695 1947 48,800
7 Margaret 1,264,774 1921 28,468
8 Susan 1,123,481 1955 47,418
9 Dorothy 1,112,231 1924 39,996
10 Sarah 1,098,498 1982 28,483

Source: U.S. Social Security Administration, Baby Names from Social Security Card Applications, National Data. Figures are pulled from NameAlmanac's current dataset and update automatically when the source is refreshed. U.S. Social Security Administration, Baby Names from Social Security Card Applications, National Data. Figures are pulled from NameAlmanac's current dataset and update automatically when the source is refreshed.

Findings

Top entity in the ranking

The top-ranked record in this dataset is Mary, with a value of 4,141,481 on the All-time total births column. The full top-10 set is rendered in the table above. No number on this page is hardcoded, when U.S. Social Security Administration publishes a revision, the ranking and the prose around it update automatically.

Distribution shape

The gap between the top-ranked record (4,141,481) and the 10th-ranked record (1,098,498) characterizes how concentrated the top of the distribution is. Where the top value is many multiples of the median value of the visible set, the population is highly concentrated, a small number of entities accumulate the bulk of the measured quantity. Where the top and bottom of the visible set are close together, the distribution is relatively flat across the top end. The full distribution beyond this top-10 cut is summarized in the aggregate context section below and explored in the linked entity profiles.

Aggregate context

Across the full names population, the aggregate query returns the following summary statistics. These anchors situate the top-10 ranking against the underlying population: how many records exist in total, what the sum of the ranking column is across all qualifying rows, and what the mean per-record value looks like. The methodology page documents the exact filter applied by the aggregate query (records with null or zero values on the ranking column are excluded). The aggregate row is computed by the same database engine that renders the ranking above, against the same snapshot.

Source provenance

The records in this ranking originate from U.S. Social Security Administration, specifically the Baby Names from Social Security Card Applications, National Data. NameAlmanac ingests the source vintage published by the agency and serves it from its current dataset, there is no static export carrying stale numbers, and a newly published source vintage propagates to this page automatically. The methodology page documents the source URL, the vintage date, and how the figures are compiled.

Why this ranking matters

Rankings like this one let a reader scan a population quickly and identify outliers, concentrations, and patterns that warrant deeper investigation. The detail pages linked from each entity in the table above give the full per-entity context: time-series history where available, related metrics from adjacent tables, and links onward to the underlying source records. The methodology page explains how an entity earns inclusion in the dataset and how the ranking column is computed at the source.

What this analysis cannot tell us

The SSA Baby Names release suppresses names with fewer than 5 births in a given year-state combination to protect individual privacy; all-time female totals therefore omit very rare names. Cumulative female totals are higher than male totals in many decades partly because female naming variants proliferate more widely (Mary, Maria, Marie, Marian are distinct entries despite shared etymology). Spelling-sensitive aggregation means a name like Catherine appears separately from Katherine, Catharine, Kathryn, etc., reducing apparent cumulative totals relative to a phonetic aggregation. The dataset reflects births to people who received a Social Security number; births of US citizens born abroad or to families who never enrolled their child in Social Security are not included. Pre-1937 records reflect retrospective reconstruction from later SS applications and are necessarily incomplete.

Secondary cut from the same source

Top 10 female names of the 2020s, precomputed from the rankings table

births

What this shows Cumulative all-time totals favor names that stayed popular across many decades, so long-running classics outrank recent trend names.

Source U.S. Social Security Administration

Related data

Sources