America’s most popular baby names haven’t changed in 7 years
Boy parents seem to have struggled to look away from one name in particular over the last decade.
Last Friday, new data from the Social Security Administration revealed the most popular baby names in the US for 2025, based on Social Security card applications submitted at birth.
The report found that Olivia and Liam were again the top picks for baby girls and boys — marking the seventh straight year that Olivia’s been top of mind for girl moms and dads, and the ninth where Liam has been the go-to for American boys.
Nominal changes
Per the SSA release, last year saw “minimal shifts in the top 10” overall. Among the girls, Charlotte overtook Emma as the second-most-popular name after six years of the latter consistently being runner-up; Ava, which had been in the top 10 since 2005, was replaced in the ranking by Eliana.
Meanwhile, the boys’ top 10 was entirely unchanged from last year — also the same as 2023, barring a few slight position switches — with the top 4 rounded out by Noah, Oliver, and Theodore.
Looking back at SSA data across the last century, America’s most popular male name has switched hands only seven times, fewer than the 11 different titles that have topped the girls’ chart through the years.
That US females have more first-name diversity tracks with Census data, which surveyed the names of all US adults (not just babies) and found that 16% of the nation’s males had one of the top 10 most frequent names among men, compared with 7.8% of women.
However, even as parents’ top picks have remained largely the same, they are being chosen less frequently. Indeed, Liam was down 6% year over year from the ~22,000 births recorded for 2024 — still nowhere near the ~60,000 seen during peak Robert in the 1920s — while there were ~6,000 fewer new Olivias in 2025 than a decade before.
As a growing number of Americans opt to give their kids more unique names (the SSA noted that the fastest-rising boy and girl names last year were Kasai and Klarity), the tallies among the top given names might keep dwindling, or perhaps take on some alternate spellings. But, as Davids and Lindas may attest, sometimes you can’t beat the classics.
A little bit of moniker...
Since 1900, several boys’ names have dominated at the top, accounting for between 2% and 3% of total US births in their respective years.
Even so, there is a marked decline in the number of male names making up a more than 0.5% share of total births after 2000, when the trend for giving children more individual titles ticked up.
Compare this with girls’ names: though Mary keeps a significant lead as the most popular girls’ name for the first half of the last century, very few girls’ names maintain a share of births close to 1% from 1990 onward; after 2021, no single girls’ name made up a share greater than 0.5%.
