Methodology

The Social Security Administration compiles its Popular Baby Names data from Social Security card applications. That is an important distinction: it is not a birth registry. A name is counted as it was written on the application, in the year of birth stated there. Applications filed late still land in the birth year, but a child who never had a card application never appears.

Because the count follows the spelling on the form, variants are separate entries. Aiden and Aidan are two names in this data, not one name spelled two ways. Any ranking that merges them is making an editorial choice; we do not, because the merge rule would be ours rather than the source's.

We use the national file for 2008 through 2025and take the top 100 names per year from each of the boys' and girls' lists. That yields 345 distinct names with their own pages, each showing rank history, peak year, and birth counts.

Overall rankings are the sum of the two sex-specific files. A name used for both boys and girls therefore ranks higher overall than it does in either list on its own, which is why a unisex name can appear at, say, #12 overall while sitting at #30 among boys.

SSA publishes the previous year annually, usually in the first half of the following year. Past years do not change once published, so historical ranks on this site are stable.

The state figures come from a separate SSA file covering all fifty states and the District of Columbia. We publish 51 state pages for 2025 plus a year by year history of the top names in each, and we use the same file to show where each national name is concentrated.

The five-occurrence rule matters more than it sounds. SSA withholds any name with fewer than 5 occurrences in a given state and year, to prevent identifying individuals. A name absent from a state list means fewer than 5, never zero. We never substitute zero for a withheld value, and we say how many jurisdictions are withheld rather than implying the name was unused. The rule is stated on SSA's limits page.

One consequence: rare names look more regional than they are. A name with 400 births spread thinly nationwide can show up in only fifteen states, because it fell under the threshold in the rest. We report the count of states with a figure so that effect stays visible instead of reading as concentration.

Regional shares use the four US Census Bureau regions, with the District of Columbia grouped in the South as the Census Bureau does. A share is the portion of that name's national total coming from the region, not the portion of that region's births, so it says where the name's bearers are rather than how common it is locally.

Head to head comparisons combine explosively, so we only generate a pair when all three conditions hold: both names have reached the top 5 at some point, the sexes are compatible, and the two have actually traded places. A pair where one name led every single year has nothing to compare, so it is excluded.

Of the pairs we generate, only the top 12 per country are offered to search engines, ranked by how many years the two appear together and how often the lead changed. The rest remain readable on the site but are not indexed.

Year trend pages compare against the immediately preceding year. The first year of the range has nothing to compare against and the latest year is already on the rankings home, so both are excluded. “Entered the top 100” means what it says: the name crossed into the cap we publish, not that it was newly used that year.