Baby Names by State

By the Baby Name Data Editorial Team · Last updated: October 2026

The pages below use the Social Security Administration's state file, which tabulates the same Social Security card application records by the state in which the birth occurred. Each state page carries that state's complete top 25 girls' and boys' names for 2024, its leading names summed across 2010 to 2024, and its 1980 leaders for a two-generation comparison, all counted under the same rules as the national tables: each sex ranked separately, spelling treated literally, and names below five recorded births in a state, year, and sex withheld from the public file. The states covered are the twenty with the largest recorded birth totals in 2024, which together account for the large majority of births in the national file.

Each state page follows the same structure so that states can be compared like for like: the same table size, the same fifteen-year window, the same 1980 comparison point, and the same three frequently asked questions, answered from that state's own file. That uniformity is deliberate. A comparison between two states is only meaningful if both sides were counted under identical rules, and the fastest way to mislead with state data is to change the window, the table size, or the comparison year from one state to the next. Readers who move from one state page to another can therefore trust that any difference they see is a difference in the records themselves, in how families in those states actually named their children, and not an artefact of a method that changed between pages.

The twenty states were chosen by recorded births in 2024, the most recent year in the file, so the selection reflects the current geography of American births rather than a historical one. Between them they include the long-established leaders of the national birth count and the faster-growing states whose share of national births has risen across the period this site covers. A state's page is built to be read in about two minutes: its current leaders first, then the fifteen-year view that separates fixtures from arrivals, then the 1980 comparison that shows how far the state's own taste has travelled within living memory, and finally the frequently asked questions, which answer the three comparisons readers most often want from a state table without requiring them to assemble the figures from the national pages themselves.

State tables reward attention because they disagree with the national table in informative ways. A name can lead a large state while ranking several places lower nationally, and regional favourites can hold top positions inside one state while barely registering in another. Comparing a state's 2024 leaders with its fifteen-year leaders also shows which of its current favourites are settled fixtures and which have arrived only recently, a distinction a single-year table alone cannot make.

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/