How Common Is My Name?

First Name, Last Name, or Both

"How common is my name" turns out to be three different questions, and they need three different datasets to answer.

• How common is my first name. That is the checker above. It reads the Social Security Administration's national birth records, 1880 through 2024, covering 372,009,150 births and 104,819 distinct first names.
• How common is my last name. Different source entirely. Surnames come from the Census Bureau, which counts living people rather than births. Use surname rarity for that, or jump straight to a name: Smith, Garcia, Nguyen, Patel.
• How common is my full name. Nobody publishes a list of first-and-last combinations, so this one has to be estimated. There is a method further down that gets you close.

Common is a spectrum

Some names are everywhere and some are once-in-a-generation. This tool puts a number on it. We divide the 372,009,150 recorded U.S. births since 1880 by how many got your name, so you see exactly how common it is: 1 in 71 for the biggest names, 1 in several hundred for the everyday favorites, and much higher for the unusual ones.

The most common names

The all-time leaders are James, John, Robert, Michael, William, Mary, David, Joseph, Richard, Charles. Names like these have been handed to millions of people over more than a century, which is why you probably know several of each.

What "common" looks like on the card

Your card shows your tier and your rank. Land in Very Common and you are in rare company at the top: only a couple hundred names are that widespread. Most people sit comfortably in Common, sharing their name with somewhere between 1 in 200 and 1 in 2,000 Americans.

Tier	How many share the name
Very Common	more than 1 in 200 people
Common	about 1 in 200 to 1 in 2,000
Uncommon	about 1 in 2,000 to 1 in 20,000
Rare	about 1 in 20,000 to 1 in 200,000
Very Rare	about 1 in 200,000 to 1 in 2 million
Ultra Rare	rarer than 1 in 2 million

How Common Is My Last Name?

Surnames work on completely different numbers, and they spread much wider than first names do.

The Census surname file counts 162,253 distinct surnames across 265,667,228 people. Even the most common one is not that common in absolute terms: Smith, at number one, covers about 2,442,977 Americans, which is 1 in 109. Compare that to the top first names, which run around 1 in 71. The single most common surname in the country is still rarer than a handful of first names.

The drop-off is steep after the top few:

Surname	Rank	About how many	Share
Smith	1	2,442,977	1 in 109
Johnson	2	1,932,812	1 in 137
Garcia	6	1,166,120	1 in 228
Nguyen	38	437,645	1 in 607
Patel	95	229,973	1 in 1,155
Yoder	598	56,410	1 in 4,710
Okafor	15,194	1,939	1 in 137,012

By rank 600 you are already at 1 in 4,710. Most surnames are far rarer than most people assume, which is why a common first name paired with an ordinary last name can still be a nearly unique combination.

Full breakdowns are on the surname rarity checker.

How Common Is My Full Name?

No agency publishes counts of first-and-last-name pairs, so an exact answer does not exist. You can estimate it, though, and the estimate is usually good enough to be interesting.

Multiply the two shares. If your first name is held by 1 in 400 people and your surname by 1 in 600, the rough combination is 1 in 240,000. Against a US population of about 335 million, that predicts somewhere near 1,400 people with your exact name.

Two honest caveats, and they pull in opposite directions:

The estimate usually runs too rare. First and last names are not independent. They correlate with ancestry, region, religion, and generation. A Spanish first name pairs with a Spanish surname far more often than chance would predict, so real counts for culturally matched pairs tend to come out higher than the multiplication suggests.

But the first-name figure is births, not living people. The SSA number counts everyone recorded since 1880, including people who have died. For a name that peaked in the 1920s, the number of living holders is a fraction of the total. For a name that peaked in 2015, almost all of them are still here. The name popularity checker shows the by-decade curve so you can see which case you are in.

Put those together and treat the result as an order of magnitude, not a headcount. It tells you whether to expect a dozen people or a hundred thousand.

Is This Worldwide or Just the US?

United States only, and it is worth being straight about why.

Both datasets are American: SSA birth registrations and the Census surname file. There is no single global name registry, and the countries that do publish name statistics use different collection methods, different years, and different rules about what counts as a name. Stitching them into one worldwide number would produce something that looks authoritative and is not.

So a name that reads as rare here can be ordinary elsewhere. Mateo is uncommon in US records and extremely common across Latin America. The same goes in reverse for names that are almost exclusively American.

If your name is common in another country, the US figure is telling you how unusual it is here, which is often the more interesting number anyway.

Where Your Name Sits Against Everyone Else's

Rank and share answer slightly different questions, and the checker gives you both.

Rank tells you where you stand in the ordering: 1st, 400th, 12,000th. Share tells you how many people that actually means. The two come apart quickly because name popularity has a very long tail. The gap between rank 1 and rank 100 is enormous. The gap between rank 10,000 and rank 10,100 is almost nothing.

• To see the top of the list, most common names in America runs through the all-time leaders and why they held on.
• To see how your name has moved over time, name popularity plots it by decade.
• To go the other direction, how rare is your name frames the same data around unusualness, and what makes a name rare explains where the tier boundaries come from.
• For the exact sources and arithmetic, see methodology.