About the project

Name statistics without the black box.

How Common Is My Name? is an independent reference project that turns large U.S. government name files into clear, private, and useful answers.

Why we built it

Most name tools either provide one unexplained number or mix historical births with the number of people alive today. We wanted the result to be easy enough for casual curiosity while remaining precise about what was measured, what was estimated, and what the public data cannot show.

Our principles

• Primary sources first. Core statistics come from the U.S. Census Bureau and Social Security Administration.
• Measured and modeled are different. Census component counts are displayed separately from full-name estimates.
• Missing does not mean zero. Names below government publication thresholds are labeled accordingly.
• Aggregates are not identities. A name cannot determine an individual person’s background or characteristics.
• Privacy should be structural. Searches happen in the browser without a name-search API or account.

What the project covers

The current index contains more than 113,000 first names from SSA history and more than 156,000 published Census surnames. It combines the 2020 Census names release with SSA national birth records from 1880 through 2025.

Corrections and questions

Government releases can change, and clear methodology benefits from scrutiny. The site’s data pipeline is reproducible, and the methodology page documents the calculations and limitations used throughout the checker.