Methodology & data sources

Transparency is the core of our E-E-A-T. This page documents exactly where our baby-name data comes from, how we process it, the snapshot date, and what the data can and cannot tell you.

Data source

All figures come from the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) Popular Baby Names program, which tabulates the names on Social Security card applications for US births. It is the authoritative, public-domain source for US name popularity.

• National data (names.zip): a file per year, 1880–2025, each line Name,Sex,Count. Rank is the position within a sex for that year.
• State-specific data (namesbystate.zip): a file per state, 1910–2025, each line ST,Sex,Year,Name,Count.

Snapshot & latest year

SSA national data through 2025, state data through 2025, retrieved June 2026. The SSA typically releases the prior calendar year around May. Our current snapshot covers national data through 2025 and state data through 2025. To refresh, we re-run our open ETL script (scripts/fetch-data.mjs), which downloads the SSA zips, parses them, and writes the JSON the site is built from. The build itself uses no network.

What we compute

• Rank & count by year for 661 names (the 2025 top names of each sex, top names of each decade, and enduring classics).
• Peak year/rank and all-time total, summing the real SSA counts across the years we track.
• Top 100 by year (42 year pages) and top 25 by state (51 states).
• Rankings: all-time totals; fastest-rising/falling (rank change vs the prior year); most gender-neutral (boy/girl share); and comebacks (in the top 200 now but not in 1980–2000).

What we do NOT do

• No invented numbers. SSA only publishes names with at least 5 occurrences in a year (a privacy rule). A year missing from a name's series means it fell below that threshold or outside our tracked anchor years - we never infer a suppressed count; such cells show "—" or "not in top".
• No name meanings or origins. The SSA dataset contains only counts. We do not add meanings, etymologies or "personality" claims, because they would not be sourced from this data.

Limitations

• Counts reflect Social Security card applications, which cover nearly all US births but not literally every birth.
• Spelling variants are counted separately (e.g. Sofia and Sophia are different names).
• All-time totals are a close lower bound because sub-5 counts are suppressed.
• State pages currently show the latest reported year per state; deeper state history exists in SSA's raw files.

Data sources

NameTrends is not affiliated with the Social Security Administration. Always verify against the primary source. See our disclaimer.

Last updated: 2026-06-22