Reading ranks and counts
Every table on NewbornNames has three columns: a rank, a name, and a count of babies. This guide says exactly what each column means in the U.S. Social Security Administration's data, using the 2025 figures the site is built from. In 2025, Liam was the #1 boy name with 20,818 babies and Olivia the #1 girl name with 13,544. What those two numbers do and do not say is the whole subject of this page.
What a rank is
A rank is a name's position within one sex for one year, ordered by descending count. Rank #1 is the name recorded on the most Social Security card applications that year, and the ranks below it follow the count downward. The SSA publishes its year files already in this order, and the site's build pipeline preserves it, so the rank you see is the SSA's own rank rather than a recomputation.
The committed depth for the 2025 lists is the top 1,000 names per sex. On the boys' side that runs from #1 Liam (20,818 babies) to #1,000 Langston (227); on the girls' side from #1 Olivia (13,544) to #1,000 Harmoni (252). There are no gaps inside those lists: an automated test over the committed files checks that every rank from #1 to #1,000 appears exactly once per sex. Past #1,000, the 2025 year-wide data on this site stops, except where a letter page carries deeper ranks, which is covered below.
What a count is
The count — the "Babies" column — is the number of Social Security card applications for U.S. births in that year whose recorded given name was that exact spelling and whose recorded sex was that sex. It is never estimated, rounded, merged across spellings, or extrapolated. The 1,000 boy names of 2025 together account for 1,387,686 applications and the 1,000 girl names for 1,182,238. Read against those totals, #1 Liam is 1.5% of the boys' top-1,000 births and #1 Olivia is 1.1% of the girls'. Those totals cover only the committed depth; the names ranked past #1,000 in the full SSA file are outside it, so neither figure is a share of all 2025 births.
Ties are broken alphabetically
Two names given to the same number of babies in the same year receive adjacent ranks, and the SSA decides which comes first alphabetically. Neighbouring ranks can therefore represent identical counts, and the difference between them is zero babies. The 2025 lists contain many such ties: 287 adjacent pairs with equal counts among boys and 301 among girls, so 467 of the 1,000 boys' ranks and 492 of the girls' ranks share their count with a rank next to them.
The first tie on the 2025 boys' list:
| Rank | Name | Babies |
|---|---|---|
| #132 | Calvin | 2,710 |
| #133 | Ryder | 2,710 |
Calvin ranks above Ryder only because C comes before R in the alphabet: both names were recorded exactly 2,710 times in 2025. On the girls' list the first tie appears at #24:
| Rank | Name | Babies |
|---|---|---|
| #24 | Ellie | 6,176 |
| #25 | Lucy | 6,176 |
The longest run of equal counts among 2025 boy names is 8 names at 269 babies each, ranks #883 to #890, from Emory through Trey; among girl names it is 7 names at 313, ranks #862 to #868, from Arisbeth through Soraya. Inside the top 100, no tie groups begin on the boys' list and 2 on the girls'. The build checks that every tie group in the committed lists is in alphabetical order, so this is a tested claim, not an assumption.
Rankings are per sex
Each sex has its own list, so a name used for both boys and girls has two ranks and two counts, and nothing on this site adds them together. In 2025, 82 names appear in both the boys' and the girls' top 1,000. Take Micah: it is #90 among boys with 3,817 babies and #909 among girls with 291. The best-placed shared name on the boys' side is Noah (#2 for boys, #624 for girls); on the girls' side it is Avery (#37 for girls, #291 for boys). Adding the two counts would produce a figure the SSA never published, so the site keeps them apart — on the top 100 boy names and top 100 girl names pages and on every letter page.
The spread from #1 to #10 to #100 to #1,000
Counts fall quickly with rank, and not evenly. Four 2025 milestones for each sex:
| Rank | Name | Babies |
|---|---|---|
| #1 | Liam | 20,818 |
| #10 | Lucas | 10,219 |
| #100 | Myles | 3,511 |
| #1,000 | Langston | 227 |
| Rank | Name | Babies |
|---|---|---|
| #1 | Olivia | 13,544 |
| #10 | Eliana | 8,191 |
| #100 | Juniper | 2,618 |
| #1,000 | Harmoni | 252 |
Among 2025 boys, #1 Liam has 2.0 times the babies of #10 Lucas; #10 has 2.9 times the babies of #100 Myles; and #100 has 15.5 times the babies of #1,000 Langston. Among girls the three ratios are 1.7, 3.1 and 10.4. Put as shares: the top 10 boy names hold 9.8% of all top-1,000 boys' births and the top 100 hold 46.8%; for girls the top 10 hold 9.5% and the top 100 hold 42.8%. 10 boy names and 7 girl names were given to at least 10,000 babies in 2025; from #337 (Gideon) downward for boys and from #306 (Joanna) downward for girls, every name has fewer than 1,000.
The generator's popularity tiers are rank bands laid over this curve. In the 2025 data each band spans these counts:
| Ranks | Boys, first to last | Girls, first to last |
|---|---|---|
| #1–#10 | Liam 20,818 → Lucas 10,219 | Olivia 13,544 → Eliana 8,191 |
| #1–#100 | Liam 20,818 → Myles 3,511 | Olivia 13,544 → Juniper 2,618 |
| #101–#500 | Adam 3,501 → Royce 606 | Aaliyah 2,607 → Bianca 594 |
| #501–#1,000 | Damon 604 → Langston 227 | Mae 594 → Harmoni 252 |
What a gap between rows on a letter page means
The letter pages — for example boy names starting with A — list the top 50 names for one initial, but the rank column is each name's overall rank among all 2025 names of that sex, not a rank within the letter. So the ranks on a letter page skip, and the names in between begin with other letters. The size of the skip says how crowded the letter is near the top. On the 2025 girls' A page, the widest jump between adjacent rows is 18 ranks, from #41 Abigail to #59 Adeline, because the top 1,000 contains 170 A names for girls. On the girls' Q page, the widest jump is 2,833 ranks, from #11,688 Quynn (8 babies) to #14,521 Quinnleigh (6); only 2 Q names for girls sit inside the top 1,000.
Letter lists are not cut off at #1,000. Because the per-letter files are the top 50 for each initial drawn from the full 2025 year file, 35 of the 52 letter lists reach past rank #1,000, and 1,020 entries across them carry overall ranks beyond the top-1,000 list. The deepest rank printed anywhere on the site is #17,092, Urwa, on the girls' U page, with 5 babies. Of the 52 letter lists, 3 are shorter than 50 because fewer names qualified in 2025: Q for boys has 39, Q for girls has 34, U for girls has 32. Nothing is padded to fill them.
The fewer-than-5 floor
The SSA omits any name given fewer than 5 times to babies of one sex in a year, to protect privacy. Three consequences follow for reading the tables. First, the smallest count that can appear is 5, and it does appear: 22 entries across the 52 letter lists for 2025 sit at exactly 5 babies, among them Quavion at #13,417 on the boys' Q page, and a further 13 sit at 6. Second, a name's absence from a list is not evidence that nobody received it; it may have been given up to 4 times, and the data cannot distinguish that from none at all. Third, near the floor many names share the same small count, so the alphabetical tie-break decides most of the ordering there and a difference of a few ranks means little. The top-1,000 lists never reach the floor: the 2025 #1,000 boy name still has 227 babies and the #1,000 girl name 252.
Why "babies" means card applications for that spelling
The SSA's data is built from applications for Social Security cards, not from birth certificates. Each row counts applications that recorded a year of birth, a sex, and a state of birth, with a given name of at least 2 characters, for births in the 50 states and the District of Columbia; births in U.S. territories are tabulated separately and are not in the national file. The SSA removes hyphens and spaces from the first-name field before counting, so a two-part spelling is counted as one entry, and it does not edit the rest: a recorded sex may be wrong, and entries such as "Unknown" stay in the lists. Every remaining spelling difference counts separately — the SSA's own example is Caitlin, Kaitlyn, and Katelyn, each with its own rank and count — and this site never merges them. The guide to why spelling variants chart separately shows what that looks like in the 2025 data. None of this makes a count wrong; it makes the count precise about one spelling, which is the only thing it measures.
Frequently asked questions
Does a lower rank number mean more babies?
Yes. Rank #1 is the name recorded on the most Social Security card applications for one sex in one year, and counts fall as the rank number rises. In 2025, #1 Liam has 20,818 boys and #1,000 Langston has 227; #1 Olivia has 13,544 girls and #1,000 Harmoni has 252.
Can two names have the same rank?
No. When two names have the same count in the same year, the SSA gives them adjacent ranks in alphabetical order. The first such tie on the 2025 boys' list is Calvin (#132) and Ryder (#133), both with 2,710 babies; on the girls' list it is Ellie (#24) and Lucy (#25), both with 6,176.
Is a name ranked the same for boys and girls?
No. Rankings are per sex, so a name used for both has two separate ranks and two separate counts that are never added together. In 2025, Micah is #90 among boys with 3,817 babies and #909 among girls with 291; 82 names appear in both top-1,000 lists.
Why does a letter page show ranks past #1,000 when the top list stops there?
The top-1,000 lists are the committed depth for the 2025 year as a whole, but each letter page carries the top 50 names for one initial drawn from the full year file, with each name's overall rank. For letters with few names near the top, that reaches far down: the deepest rank on any letter page is #17,092, Urwa, on the girls' U page, with 5 babies.
What is the smallest count that can appear?
5. The SSA excludes any name given fewer than 5 times to babies of one sex in a year, so no published count is lower. In the 2025 letter lists, 22 entries sit at exactly 5 babies. A name that is missing may have been given up to 4 times or not at all — the data cannot tell those apart.
Do the counts include every baby born that year?
No. A count is the number of Social Security card applications that recorded that exact spelling and that sex for a birth in the 50 states and the District of Columbia, with a year of birth, sex, and state of birth on record and a given name of at least 2 characters. Births in U.S. territories are tabulated separately, and the figures come from applications rather than birth certificates.
Related pages
The top 100 boy names and top 100 girl names of 2025 put these conventions to work, with the A–Z letter pages linked from each. The guides index covers the rest of the dataset, and the methodology page documents the pipeline that turns the SSA archive into the committed files every figure on this page was computed from.
Source: every name, rank, and count on this page comes from the U.S. Social Security Administration's national baby-names dataset (2025 data, from Social Security card applications). It is public-domain U.S. government data; names given fewer than 5 times in a year are excluded by the SSA, spelling variants are counted separately, and the data covers U.S. births only. Full caveats on the methodology page.