How Baby Name Rankings Are Calculated
A baby name rank is a position in a sorted list, and everything about how to interpret it follows from how that list is built. For each year and each sex separately, every name in the SSA file is ordered by its birth count from highest to lowest. The name with the highest count is rank one, the next is rank two, and so on down the table. There is no adjustment for the total number of births in the year, no weighting, and no merging of spellings: the rank is purely the name's finishing position among all names recorded for that sex in that year at five or more births.
Because the ranking pool changes size, rank and count can move in opposite directions, and understanding that is essential to reading this site honestly. In a year with many births and many competing names, a name can record more births than it did the year before and still fall in rank, simply because several rivals grew faster. In a smaller year the reverse happens. Share of births, the percentage of all recorded births for that sex and year that a name accounts for, corrects for the changing size of the year itself, which is why name pages here report count, rank, and share together as a standard trio rather than treating any one of them as the whole story.
Decade and state rankings on this site use the identical method applied to summed or geographically filtered counts. A decade rank sorts the ten-year totals; a state rank sorts only the births recorded in that state. Neither is an average of annual ranks, and averaging ranks would in fact be a poorer method, because it would give a small year the same influence as a large one. Summing counts first and ranking once, as the SSA's own decade tables do, keeps every birth equally weighted, and that is the convention followed on every ranking page published here, with the method stated on the page wherever a summed table appears.
A worked miniature makes the method concrete. Suppose a year records three names for one sex with counts of one hundred, sixty, and forty births out of two hundred recorded births in total. Their ranks are one, two, and three, and their shares are fifty, thirty, and twenty percent respectively. If the following year the same three names record one hundred and twenty, ninety, and ninety births out of three hundred, the first name has gained twenty births yet its share has fallen from fifty to forty percent, and the second and third names are tied in count and sit side by side in the sorted order. Nothing in that example is unusual: it is the ordinary arithmetic behind almost every movement in the real tables, which is why this site refuses to report rank movements without the counts and shares that explain them.
All of the conventions described here are applied uniformly across this site: the name pages, the year tables, the decade tables, and the state pages all draw on the same SSA files, the same release rules, and the same definitions of count, rank, and share. The full source statement, including coverage and limitations, is on the methodology page, and corrections or questions about any figure can be sent through the contact page, where every message is read against the underlying file before a reply is sent.
Disclaimer: Baby Name Data publishes statistics drawn from U.S. Social Security Administration baby name records. Figures are counts of Social Security card applications by year of birth and are shown for general information only. Counts below five in any year, sex, or state are not released by the SSA and are not estimated here. Nothing on this page is advice about what to name a child.
Data: U.S. Social Security Administration baby name records, 1880–2024, retrieved October 2026. Source: ssa.gov/oact/babynames/