How the SSA Counts Baby Names
Every number on this site begins as an application for a Social Security card. When a child's birth is registered in the United States, the information supplied for that registration, including the child's first name as recorded, becomes part of the administrative records from which the Social Security Administration builds its public baby name file. The SSA tabulates those records by year of birth, not by the year the paperwork was processed, which is why the published series can reach back to 1880: it includes people born in the nineteenth century who applied for cards later in life, when the Social Security system existed and their births were documented as part of that process.
That origin explains both the strengths and the limits of the data. The strength is scale and consistency: the same administrative pipeline, applying the same basic tabulation, covers the entire country across 145 years, producing the longest continuous naming record available for the United States. The limits follow from the same source. Early years cover a smaller fraction of all births than recent years, because card applications from people born in the 1880s only exist for those who later entered the system. The SSA itself notes that the earliest data should be read as a large sample rather than a complete census of births, which is why this site always shows shares and ranks alongside raw counts, and why comparisons between 1880 and 2024 should lean on those relative measures more than on the absolute totals.
Three mechanical rules shape every published figure. First, names are tabulated exactly as spelled, with hyphens and spaces removed, so similar names and spelling variants are separate entries. Second, each sex is tabulated and ranked separately throughout. Third, and most importantly for small names, any name recorded fewer than five times in a given year and sex is withheld from the public file entirely, for privacy. Withheld names are not published as small counts, are not estimated by the SSA, and are never estimated or reconstructed on this site. Every total described as recorded births on these pages therefore means births at or above that threshold, and the gap matters most in the earliest years and at state level, where populations are smaller.
It is worth being precise about what applications means in the modern part of the file. For births in recent decades, registration and card application happen as a single routine step for the overwhelming majority of children born in the United States, so the modern file is for practical purposes a near-complete register of the names given, subject only to the release threshold described below. That completeness is exactly what makes comparisons across the full span delicate: the modern end of the series measures almost every birth, the early end measures a large and systematically documented subset, and a method statement that pretended both ends were identical would misdescribe the source. This site's practice of leading with rank and share for early years, and count alongside them, exists to keep that difference in view without discarding the early record, which remains the best naming evidence the nineteenth century left behind.
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/