Debra
The girl's name Debra has been in the national records since 1914, with 551,841 births to its name. In 2025 it ranked 4,460th. About 460,000 Debras are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 67.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Debra boys named Debra
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 551,841
- Estimated living today
- 460,000
- Median age today
- 67
- Peak year
- 1955
- Best rank
- 4th
- Rank in 2025
- 4,460th
- First recorded
- 1914
- Girls / boys
- 550,695 / 1,146
How old the living Debras are
born that year still alive today
Of the 551,841 babies given the name since 1914, about 460,000 are alive — 83 in every hundred. Roughly 940 of them are children and 301,000 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
Origin Hebrew
A spelling variant of Deborah first used in the 20th century.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Debras
- Debra Winger (born 1955)American actress
- Debra Messing (born 1968)American actress
- Debra Jo Rupp (born 1951)American actress
- Debra Paget (born 1933)American actress and entertainer
- Debra Monk (born 1949)American actress
- Debra Wilson (born 1962)American actress
- Debra Fischer (born 1951)American astronomer and academic
- Debra Hill (1950–2005)American film producer
People named Debra with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Debra is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Debra is most concentrated in Wisconsin (1.6×), Wyoming (1.6×), Iowa (1.6×), South Dakota (1.6×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1955
The most popular girls’ names the year Debra peaked:
Debra elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| New Zealand girls | Debra | 3,094 | 17th |
| Scotland girls | Debra | 408 | 157th |
| France girls | Debra | 315 | 385th |
| Ireland girls | Debra | 280 | 233rd |
| England and Wales girls | Debra | 91 | 1,392nd |
| France boys | Debra | 5 | 901st |
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.
Debra 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 girls | Debra | 8 | 8 |
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
Debra 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.