About Baby Name Data
Baby Name Data exists to do one thing well: publish accurate, readable statistics from the U.S. Social Security Administration's baby name records, covering 1880 through 2024. The site was built because the official data, while public and remarkably rich, is distributed as raw text files that most readers will never open. By converting those files into ranked tables, decade summaries, state comparisons, and per-name histories, with the method stated plainly on every page, this site aims to make a public dataset genuinely usable by the public it describes, without adding anything the data does not contain.
Our Editorial Team
The Baby Name Data Editorial Team is responsible for every page on this site. The team's work is statistical and editorial rather than creative: extracting the official files, computing ranks and shares under the published method, checking headline figures against the SSA's own published top-name tables before release, writing the explanatory text that surrounds each table, and correcting any figure found to be wrong. The team does not invent name meanings, origins, or cultural claims, does not estimate withheld counts, and does not publish a figure it cannot trace to a specific line of the source file. Byline and last-updated information appears under the heading of every page so readers can see exactly who stands behind it and when it was last reviewed.
Methodology
Our methodology, in brief: counts are taken directly from the SSA national and state baby name files; ranks are calculated by sorting counts from highest to lowest within one year, one sex, and one geography; shares divide a name's count by all recorded births for the same year, sex, and geography; decade figures sum the annual counts before ranking once. Names are kept exactly as spelled in the source, each sex is treated separately everywhere except the clearly labelled combined all-time list, and names below the SSA's five-birth release threshold are absent because the source does not release them. The full statement is on the methodology page, and the guides linked from it explain each convention in more depth.
Questions, corrections, and suggestions are welcome through the contact page. A correction backed by the SSA's own published table will always win over a figure on this site, and corrected pages are updated with a fresh last-updated stamp.
The site is organised so that every claim can be checked in seconds. Each data page carries its source line at the foot, each method is stated where it is used, and the index pages list every table the site publishes, so there is no hidden content and no page that cannot be reached from the public indexes. The editorial team reviews the full set of tables whenever the SSA releases a new year of data, rebuilds any table the new file changes, and re-verifies the headline figures for the newest year against the agency's own published rankings before the updated pages are posted. Between releases, the team's work is corrections, clearer explanations of the same verified figures, and additional tables drawn from the same files, never new claims from new sources.
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/