No one can tell you exactly how many people in the world share your name. There is no global register of names: each country keeps its own records, in its own alphabet, and many countries publish no name statistics at all. What can be counted well is how many people have your name in the United States, from Social Security birth records and Census Bureau surname counts. This guide shows what those records say, and how to check your own name.
To look up your first name now, type it in the search box on the home page.
How Many People in the US Have Your First Name?
How Many of Mee estimates how many people alive in the US have each first name: the babies given the name in each year from 1880 to 2025, in Social Security records, times the share of each birth year still alive. The methodology page works through the calculation. Here are some of the names people often search for:
| Name | People alive in the US (estimate) | About 1 in |
|---|---|---|
| James | 2,933,167 | 116 |
| John | 2,737,543 | 124 |
| David | 2,705,330 | 126 |
| Mary | 1,715,483 | 199 |
| Daniel | 1,627,478 | 210 |
| Matthew | 1,532,905 | 222 |
| Ryan | 947,873 | 360 |
| Jacob | 928,992 | 367 |
| Sarah | 889,399 | 384 |
| Emily | 814,621 | 419 |
| Liam | 355,769 | 960 |
Michael has the most people alive of any first name, about 3,595,413, or 1 in 95 people in the US. The rarity tiers show where any other name stands.
How Many First Names Are There?
Social Security records list 105,966 different first names for babies born in the US from 1880 to 2025. In 2025 alone, babies received 28,638 different names. The records include a name only in a year when at least 5 babies of the same sex received it, so the true number of names is higher. In 2025, 4,258 names were given to exactly 5 girls or exactly 5 boys, the smallest count the records show. The rarest names sit right at that line.
How Many People Have Your Last Name?
For surnames, the Census Bureau published a count of every last name that appeared at least 100 times in the 2010 Census: 162,253 surnames, shared by 265,667,228 people. Another 29,312,001 people had rarer surnames, which the Census groups together as “all other names.”
| Surname | People in the 2010 Census | Rank |
|---|---|---|
| Smith | 2,442,977 | #1 |
| Johnson | 1,932,812 | #2 |
| Garcia | 1,166,120 | #6 |
| Nguyen | 437,645 | #38 |
| Patel | 229,973 | #95 |
| Li | 111,786 | #273 |
| Wang | 109,883 | #282 |
These are people counted in 2010, not today. Every surname on the list has its own page: type yours in the search box on the surnames page. The surname guide explains how to read the Census counts.
What About Your Full Name?
No public record counts full names. The full name estimate gives a rough figure by multiplying the people alive with your first name by the share of people with your last name. That assumes first and last names are paired at random, and they are not: names follow families, languages and generations. Treat any full-name count as a rough guess. The full name guide goes through what can and can’t be known.
Why a Worldwide Count Is Out of Reach
- No global register. Each country records names its own way, and many publish no name statistics.
- Alphabets and spellings. A name written in another script becomes several spellings in English. Even in US records, the name Muhammad appears as Muhammad (21,633 people alive), Mohamed (19,002), Mohammad (16,824), Mohammed (15,839), Mohamad (3,575), Muhammed (2,550) and Muhamed (608): about 80,031 people in all, on seven separate pages.
- People born abroad. US birth records leave out people born in other countries, so US figures run low for names common among immigrants.
How to Check Your Own Name
- Type your first name in the search box on the home page, or browse the names by first letter, starting with A.
- Its page shows about how many people alive in the US have it, 1 in how many people that is, its rank, how its popularity changed since 1880, and the states where those people were born.
- Try other spellings too. Each spelling is a separate name in the records.
- For your last name, look it up in the Census counts described above.