The Rarest Names in America: 67,460 Names With Fewer Than 100 Living Bearers

Ask someone how many people share their name and they usually expect a big number. For most names, the answer is the opposite. We ran the numbers across every first name in the Social Security Administration's baby-name records — 104,819 distinct names given between 1880 and 2024 — and estimated how many living bearers each one has today. The result: rarity is not the exception. It is the norm.

Nearly two out of three names in the records — 67,460 of them, or 64.4% — have fewer than 100 estimated living bearers. More than a quarter have fewer than 10. The median name in America has just 38 living bearers. The famous names at the top of the charts, the Michaels and Marys with millions of bearers, are a tiny minority of the names people actually carry.

How rare is rare? The full distribution

Here is how the 104,819 names break down by estimated living bearers, using our survival model (births per year, weighted by the probability that someone born in that year is still alive in 2025):

Only 3,645 names — 3.5% of the total — have 5,000 or more living bearers. And the very top is a world apart: Michael has an estimated 3,682,033 living bearers, roughly 1 in 93 Americans, followed by James (3,063,644), John (2,864,788), David (2,791,704) and Robert (2,727,368). The average name has 2,574 living bearers, but that average is dragged up by those giants; the typical name, the median one, has 38.

The rarest names of all: one living bearer

At the far end of the scale sit 1,035 names with an estimated single living bearer — one person in the entire country carrying that name, as far as the records can tell. They are almost all names that flickered briefly a century ago and then vanished from the birth records. Ten of them:

Look at the pattern: every one of these names was last given to a newborn in the 1920s or early 1930s, and most were never given to more than a few dozen babies in total. Their single estimated survivor would be around a century old. These are names at the very edge of living memory — one person away from disappearing from the population entirely.

2,853 names with (probably) no living bearer

Go one step further and the model rounds 2,853 names down to zero living bearers. Every one of them last appeared in the birth records before 1950 — the most recent last-appearance of any of them is 1930 — which means that, on the survival curve, their last bearers have almost certainly died. They are not forgotten spellings or typos; they were real names, given to real babies, whose lines have now run out. The full story of how names die out is a topic of its own, and we will come back to it.

The rarest names you can actually look up

The one-bearer names above are so rare they sit outside the 5,000 most common names, so they don't have their own pages on this site. But rarity starts much higher up the chart than most people expect. The rarest names among the top 5,000 — each with its own page here — have only about 3,067 living bearers each:

• Elroy — 3,067 living bearers, peaked in 1922
• Naila — 3,067 living bearers, peaked in 2019
• Debi — 3,068 living bearers, peaked in 1958
• Janai — 3,069 living bearers, peaked in 2006
• Inaya — 3,070 living bearers, peaked in 2023

That last one is the interesting case: Inaya peaked in 2023, which means it is a new name climbing, not an old name fading. Rarity has two directions, and only one of them points at extinction.

Rarity isn't only about dying out

It is tempting to read this as a story of names disappearing. Half of it is. Of the names with 1–99 living bearers, 3,112 were last given to a baby before 1950 — old names quietly fading. But the other half is the opposite: 7,573 rare names last appeared in the birth records in 2024, and 9,174 of them peaked in the 2020s. New rare names are being invented every year, most of them given to just five babies — the smallest count the SSA publishes — in a single year.

Take Romance, Livvie, Zolan and Naraya: each has exactly 100 recorded births, 99 estimated living bearers, and a peak year of 2023 or 2024. They are rare because they are young, not because they are dying. A century from now, some of today's five-baby names will be the next Michaels — and most will be the next Bacilias.

How we count “living bearers”

A quick note on the method, because the numbers only mean something if you know how they were made. For each name, we take every birth recorded in the SSA files from 1880 to 2024 and weight it by the probability that someone born in that year is still alive in 2025, using a cohort survival curve interpolated from SSA life-table patterns. Add up the weighted births and you get the estimated living bearers. The full method — formulas, the survival curve, and the known limits — is on our methodology page.

Two honest caveats. First, the SSA only publishes a name for a given year if at least five babies received it, so the very rarest names — given to one or two babies — never enter the records at all, and true rarity is even greater than these figures suggest. Second, the model counts people born in the United States since 1880; across all 104,819 names it totals about 269.8 million estimated living bearers, below the current U.S. population, because immigrants who arrived with names never recorded in U.S. birth files are not in it. The figures are estimates, not a census — but they are computed the same way for every name, so the comparisons between names are solid.

Check your own name

If this has you wondering where your own name sits — somewhere between Michael's 3.6 million and Bacilia's one — you can find out in seconds. Run it through the free checker on our homepage, or use the name rarity checker to see its rarity score and how many people in a million share it. Curious about a full name? The name combination checker estimates how many people share your exact first-and-last-name pair. And if you want to see how a name rose or fell over time, the baby name popularity by year tool charts all 145 years of it.

Most names are rare names. Yours probably is too — and now you can put a number on exactly how rare.