US first names

Why is the latest data from 2024?

The Social Security Administration collects baby name data from birth certificate applications throughout the year, but does not publish it immediately. The SSA verifies each year's data and applies privacy safeguards before releasing it to the public, typically around May of the following year (often on the Friday before Mother's Day). That means the most recent year available in our database is 2024, and the 2025 data should appear sometime in mid-2026.

Baby name data vs Census data

You might wonder why we use SSA data for first names instead of Census Bureau data. The Census Bureau has not released any first-name frequency tables since 1990, and even when it did, the data only came out once per decade. The SSA, on the other hand, publishes name counts every single year, which makes it far more useful for tracking trends and spotting names that are rising or falling in popularity.

For last names, we do use Census Bureau data because the SSA does not track surnames. The two sources complement each other: SSA for first names with yearly granularity going back to 1880, and Census Bureau for surnames with demographic breakdowns.

About the data

All first-name data on Name Census comes from the Social Security Administration's national baby name files, which cover every name appearing on a US birth certificate from 1880 to 2024. Names with fewer than 5 occurrences in any given year are excluded from the published data to protect individual privacy.

Our living-bearer estimates go a step further than the raw SSA counts. We apply CDC actuarial life tables broken out by sex to each birth-year cohort, which gives an age-weighted estimate of how many people with a given name are still alive today rather than just how many were ever born.