Baby Names by Year

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

Each page below carries the complete top 100 baby names for one birth year, for girls and for boys side by side, taken directly from U.S. Social Security Administration records. The selection mixes classic benchmark years, taken at decade intervals through the twentieth century, with every recent year from 2010 through 2024, so readers can compare a modern table against the naming order of ten, fifty, or a hundred years earlier in exactly the same format. Every year page also reports that year's recorded birth total, the share taken by its leading names, and a concentration measure for the top ten, because those figures change as much across the period as the names themselves do.

The benchmark spacing is deliberate. Ten-year intervals through most of the twentieth century are close enough to trace a name's rise or fall without overwhelming the index, and the five-year additions at 1945, 1955, and onward through 1985 mark the middle of each post-war decade, when several of the century's sharpest naming turns actually occurred rather than neatly on a decade boundary. The unbroken run from 2010 to 2024 then gives the modern period annual resolution, matching the pace at which contemporary rankings actually move.

Annual tables are the rawest view of naming fashion this site offers. They show single-year spikes that decade totals smooth away, and they preserve moments where a long-serving leader finally gave way to a successor. Used together with the decade pages, which sum ten years at a time, and the individual name pages, which follow one name across all 145 years, the year tables let a reader move from the broadest pattern down to a single year's contest without changing data source or method at any step.

The year pages are also the right place to test claims about a particular year that circulate elsewhere. Any statement of the form that a given name was the most popular, the fastest rising, or newly in the top ten in a specific year can be checked in seconds against the full table for that year published here, with the count and share beside the rank so the size of the claim is visible as well as its direction. Where a claim turns out to rest on a different ranking basis, such as combined sexes, merged spellings, or a state rather than national table, the tables here make that difference identifiable rather than leaving two contradictory rankings facing each other without explanation.

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/