Brian

Popularity, 1880–2025

girls named Brian boys named Brian

By the numbers

Total US births

1,178,298

Estimated living today

1 million

Median age today

48

Peak year

1972

Best rank

8th

Rank in 2025

339th

First recorded

1909

Girls / boys

4,563 / 1,173,735

How old the living Brians are

born that year still alive today

Of the 1,178,298 babies given the name since 1909, about 1 million are alive — 88 in every hundred. Roughly 41,000 of them are children and 107,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1977 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

Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Notable Brians

• Brian May (born 1947)British musician
• Brian David Josephson (born 1940)Welsh physicist
• Brian Schmidt (born 1967)American-born Australian astrophysicist
• Brian De Palma (born 1940)American film director and screenwriter
• Brian Eno (born 1948)British musician, music producer, music theorist and visual artist
• Brian Wilson (1942–2025)American musician, singer, songwriter and record producer
• Brian Kobilka (born 1955)American physiologist
• Brian Mulroney (1939–2024)Prime Minister of Canada from 1984 to 1993

People named Brian with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).

Where Brian is most common

• CA126,426
• NY101,597
• PA72,519
• IL69,804
• OH67,968
• MI57,678
• TX49,510
• NJ45,828
• MA42,948
• FL35,169

Relative to how many babies each state records, Brian is most concentrated in New Hampshire (1.6×), Delaware (1.5×), Vermont (1.5×), Massachusetts (1.5×).

Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.

Names of 1972

The most popular boys’ names the year Brian peaked:

• Michael
• Christopher
• James
• David
• John
• Robert

All the names of 1972

Brian elsewhere

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.

Brian: births by region

Parts of a country counted above, not extra births. The share is what makes the regions comparable: they differ in size by a factor of three hundred.

By canton, Brian is most concentrated in Ticino, where 0.07% of children were given it – 45 of them.

Brian: rank by region

In 2024, Brian was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.

In 2024, Brian was among the 10 most common names in 1 region of Italy.

In 2025, Brian was given 2 times or more in 1 region of Poland.

In 2017, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Brian appears in the lists for Province of East Flanders (275th) and Province of Antwerp (346th).

Each of these is the top of a list the statistics office cut off somewhere – Belgium below 5 children, Italy after 10 names, Poland below 2 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.

Brian by city

One city over a few years, so these are much smaller numbers than the national ones above and not comparable with them.

Brian 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.

A count of people on a register – the Netherlands on 1 January 2018, 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.

Where Brian lives in Spain

Not a count of births but of people: 5,213 men called Brian were living in Spain on 1 January 2025, of every age, born in any year. Where they live is not spread evenly.

Men: the provinces where it is densest

Listed in 49 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 3 it is either held by fewer than 5 people – the point below which the source withholds a name – or it fell past the 5,000 names the source will print for one province. Neither means nobody there is called it. The rate is the source's own, not a share worked out here.

Related names

• Brittany
• Brianna
• Briana
• Bridget
• Brittney
• Brielle
• Britney
• Bridgette
• Brianne
• Bria
• Brice
• Briella

Brian against another name

Two names on one chart, with the year one overtook the other.

• Brian vs Bryan
• Brian vs Brittany
• Brian vs Brianna
• Brian vs Briana
• Brian vs Bridget
• Brian vs Brittney

Compare Brian with a name of your own