Methodology
This page states exactly how every table on Baby Name Data is built, so that any reader with the source files can reproduce any figure on the site. The sole data source is the U.S. Social Security Administration's baby name data: the national file of names by year and sex, and the state file of names by state, year, and sex, covering births from 1880 through 2024, retrieved in October 2026 from the SSA's baby names pages. No other dataset is used, no figure is bought or scraped from another naming site, and no value is estimated, modelled, or interpolated at any point in the pipeline.
Definitions
A count is the number of births recorded with an exact name spelling, for one sex, in one year, and, for state tables, one state, as published in the source file. A rank is the position of that count when all counts for the same year, sex, and geography are sorted from highest to lowest. A share is the count divided by the sum of all recorded counts for the same year, sex, and geography, expressed as a percentage. A decade figure is the sum of the ten annual counts for the period, ranked once after summing, never an average of annual ranks. The 2020s period in this file covers 2020 to 2024 only and is labelled as a five-year span wherever it appears. The all-time combined list on the names index is the single place where both sexes are summed, and it is labelled as combined wherever it is used; every rank quoted from it is a position on that combined list, not an official SSA rank.
Rules inherited from the source
The SSA removes hyphens and spaces from names before tabulation, treats each remaining spelling as a distinct name, and withholds any name recorded fewer than five times in a year, sex, or state. This site inherits all three rules without exception. It also inherits the coverage limits of an administrative record: the earliest years rest on card applications made later in life by people born from 1880 onward, and so represent a large but partial record of those birth years, a limitation stated in the site disclaimer and in the guide to how the SSA counts names. Related guides explain why names rise and fall, rank calculation, share, spelling variants, and the five-birth threshold in full.
Verification
Before publication, headline figures, including the 2024 top ten for each sex and the leading names of benchmark years, were cross-checked against the SSA's own published top-name tables and press releases for the same years, and the site is only published where those checks agree. Where a disagreement is ever found, the SSA's published table governs and the page is corrected.
Reproduction note: every figure on this site can be regenerated from the two source files with the definitions above and no additional inputs. Counts require nothing but the file itself; ranks require only sorting within the stated group; shares require only the group total; decade and fifteen-year figures require only summing the stated years before applying the same steps. No rounding is applied to counts, shares are shown to two decimal places where they appear in prose and are computed from unrounded counts, and totals described as recorded births always mean the sum of published counts at or above the release threshold. Any independent reader who applies these rules to the same files and reaches a different figure from one published here has found either a worked example of a rule being misread, most often the spelling or threshold rules, or an error on this site, and the contact page exists for exactly that report.
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/