The data
The data
Covers 1880–2025
Every rank, count and chart on this site comes from the U.S. Social Security Administration's national baby names file, 1880–2025. This page says what is in that file, what we do with it, and where it falls short.
What's in the file
One row for every combination of name, sex and year, with the number of children given that name. That is all: no meanings, no origins, no states. Names with fewer than five births in a year are not published, to protect privacy, so the file has a floor of five. The current file holds 105,966 distinct names across 146 years of records, in 2,181,032 rows.
What that means for this site
Very rare names may be missing for some years, or entirely, and a name's chart can show gaps where it dipped under five births. Spelling variants count as separate names: Adeline, Adaline and Adalynn each have their own rank, chart and page, as they do in the file, and we do not merge them. The early decades are thinner than the later ones, because the file is built from Social Security card applications and far fewer people born before the 1930s ever applied; a line that climbs from 1880 is partly the records catching up.
How "boy or girl" is calculated
The file records sex, not the name's "gender". For each name we add up its births over the last 10 years and take the share recorded as boys and as girls. A name is listed as a boy's or a girl's name when one share is at least 90%; anything closer than that is listed as gender-neutral, with the split shown on its page. 10 years, not all time, so a name that has changed sides shows up where it is now.
Which names get a page
Every name that has ever been in the top 500 for boys or for girls, in any year since 1880. That is 3,433 pages. A name without a page can still turn up in the picker, which deals from every name recorded in 2025 — 28,638 of them — with its rank and births from that year. Names that have not been recorded at all since then are in the file and on no deck. If a name climbs into the top 500 in a future year, it gets a page.
How often it's updated
Once a year. The SSA publishes the previous year's names each spring; we rebuild every rank, chart and list from the new file and change 2025 everywhere on the site. Between updates nothing moves: there are no estimates, forecasts or mid-year adjustments.
Source
U.S. Social Security Administration, Popular Baby Names, national data, 1880–2025. The file is public and free to download; the SSA's own notes on its limits are worth reading.
Spotted a number that looks wrong? Write to us with the name and the year.