Bill
Bill reached its high-water mark in 1947 at number 76, and has been recorded 161,190 times in all. In 2025 it ranked 5,208th. About 68,000 Bills are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 67.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Bill boys named Bill
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 161,190
- Estimated living today
- 68,000
- Median age today
- 67
- Peak year
- 1947
- Best rank
- 76th
- Rank in 2025
- 5,208th
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 716 / 160,474
How old the living Bills are
born that year still alive today
Of the 161,190 babies given the name since 1880, about 68,000 are alive — 42 in every hundred. Roughly 690 of them are children and 42,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1958 and half after.
An estimate, not a count. SSA births aged forward through SSA cohort life tables, which know nothing about who left the country or arrived in it — so for a name that mostly came to America rather than being born in it, this is a floor rather than a figure. Where you fall among living Americans.
Where the name comes from
Hypocorism of William. It is unclear how the initial W became a B; this could have been part of the medieval trend of swapping letters, similar to Dick for Rick.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Bills
- Bill Gates (born 1955)American businessman, investor, and philanthropist
- Bill Clinton (born 1946)President of the United States from 1993 to 2001
- Bill Murray (born 1950)American actor and comedian
- Bill Cosby (born 1937)American actor and comedian
- Bill Russell (1934–2022)American basketball player
- Bill Shankly (1913–1981)Scottish footballer and manager
- Bill Paxton (1955–2017)American actor and filmmaker
- Bill Irwin (born 1950)American actor, clown, and comedian
People named Bill with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Bill is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Bill is most concentrated in Oklahoma (3.6×), Wyoming (3.0×), Montana (2.9×), Kansas (2.5×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1947
The most popular boys’ names the year Bill peaked:
Bill elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales boys | Bill | 373 | 613th |
| Ireland boys | Bill | 286 | 247th |
| Sweden boys | Bill | 126 | 99th |
| Belgium boys | Bill | 115 | 477th |
| France boys | Bill | 105 | 6,336th |
Counts come from each country's own records and are not comparable with the US figures above, which cover different years and a different definition of a recorded name. Where a country writes the name several ways, the spellings are added together and the most common is shown. A row marked name registrations is counting something else: Portugal ranks each of a child's two given names separately, so a girl registered Maria Leonor is in both the Maria row and the Leonor row, and that figure is not a number of children.
Bill: rank by region
In 2025, Bill was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.
| Region | Spelling | Place | Children |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flanders | Bill | 642 | 8 |
In 2025, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Bill appears in the lists for Province of Antwerp (341st).
Each of these is the top of a list the statistics office cut off somewhere – Belgium below 5 children – and published nothing after. So a region missing here is one where the name fell outside what was published, not one where it went unused. Places are shared where names tie, and the further down a list a place is, the more names can share it.
Bill among the living
How many people each country's register counts under the name, rather than how many were given it in any one year. Each register was read on one date, and they are not the same date.
| Country | Spelling | First forename | Any forename |
|---|---|---|---|
| Finland boys | Bill | 52 | 65 |
A count of people on a register – Finland on 4 August 2026 – and not of births, so it cannot be compared with the figures above. Names with very few bearers are withheld, and a dash in the first-forename column means the register would not say rather than that nobody goes by it.
Related names
Bill against another name
Two names on one chart, with the year one overtook the other.
Try it on yourself
Source: US Social Security Administration, national and state baby-name files, 1880–2025. Counts include only births registered with the SSA, and names with fewer than five births in a year are not published. The living estimate applies SSA cohort life tables to those births; it counts people born in the United States, so it misses anyone who arrived later and anyone who has left.