Brendan
About 92,141 American babies have been named Brendan since 1912, most of them around 1999. In 2025 it ranked 1,097th. About 88,000 Brendans are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 28.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Brendan boys named Brendan
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 92,141
- Estimated living today
- 88,000
- Median age today
- 28
- Peak year
- 1999
- Best rank
- 96th
- Rank in 2025
- 1,097th
- First recorded
- 1912
- Girls / boys
- 325 / 91,816
How old the living Brendans are
born that year still alive today
Of the 92,141 babies given the name since 1912, about 88,000 are alive — 95 in every hundred. Roughly 14,000 of them are children and 1,100 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1997 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
Origin Irish
Anglicized form of the name of Irish saints, Irish Bréanainn (via Latin Brendanus), from Old Irish Brénainn, from owl breenhin, ultimately from Proto-Celtic *brigantīnos, a diminutive of *brigantī (“high, exalted”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Brendans
- Brendan Fraser (born 1968)Canadian-American actor
- Brendan Gleeson (born 1955)Irish actor
- Brendan Rodgers (born 1973)Northern Irish association football manager
- Brendan Behan (1923–1964)Irish poet, short story writer, novelist, and playwright
- Brendan the Navigator (486–577)Irish monastic saint
- Brendan Eich (born 1961)American computer programmer and technology executive
- Brendan Murray (born 1996)Irish singer
- Brendan Perry (born 1959)British singer and multi-instrumentalist
People named Brendan with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Brendan is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Brendan is most concentrated in Massachusetts (3.4×), Connecticut (2.7×), New Hampshire (2.6×), Rhode Island (2.1×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1999
The most popular boys’ names the year Brendan peaked:
Brendan elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ireland boys | Brendan | 11,413 | 16th |
| England and Wales boys | Brendan | 2,828 | 157th |
| New Zealand boys | Brendan | 2,010 | 67th |
| France boys | Brendan | 1,705 | 432nd |
| Scotland boys | Brendan | 1,087 | 110th |
| Northern Ireland boys | Brendan | 436 | 73rd |
| Belgium boys | Brendan | 65 | 603rd |
| Poland boys | Brendan | 2 birth registrations | 732nd |
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.
Brendan: rank by region
In 2002, Brendan was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.
| Region | Spelling | Place | Children |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wallonia | Brendan | 336 | 7 |
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.
Brendan 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 | Brendan | 19 | 32 |
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
Brendan 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.