Franklin
Franklin reached its high-water mark in 1933 at number 33, and has been recorded 142,506 times in all. In 2025 it ranked 359th. About 75,000 Franklins are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 53.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Franklin boys named Franklin
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 142,506
- Estimated living today
- 75,000
- Median age today
- 53
- Peak year
- 1933
- Best rank
- 33rd
- Rank in 2025
- 359th
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 778 / 141,728
How old the living Franklins are
born that year still alive today
Of the 142,506 babies given the name since 1880, about 75,000 are alive — 53 in every hundred. Roughly 12,000 of them are children and 25,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1972 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 a surname
From Middle English frankelein (“freeholder”), see franklin. The place names are mostly.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Franklins
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945)president of the United States from 1933 to 1945
- Franklin Pierce (1804–1869)president of the United States from 1853 to 1857
- Franklin J. Schaffner (1921–1989)American film director
- Joseph Franklin Rutherford (1869–1942)American lawyer, Watch Tower Society president
- Franklin Chang-Díaz (born 1950)Costa Rican-American astronaut and physicist
- Franklin Jonas (born 2000)American actor
- Franklin Graham (born 1952)American Christian evangelist and missionary, son of Billy Graham
- Franklin Henry Giddings (1855–1931)American economist
People named Franklin with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Franklin is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Franklin is most concentrated in West Virginia (3.4×), South Carolina (2.5×), Virginia (1.9×), North Carolina (1.8×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1933
The most popular boys’ names the year Franklin peaked:
Franklin elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales boys | Franklin | 2,599 | 260th |
| France boys | Franklin | 830 | 203rd |
| Scotland boys | Franklin | 17 | 516th |
| Ireland boys | Franklin | 16 | 646th |
| Northern Ireland boys | Franklin | 9 | 398th |
| Poland boys | Franklin | 4 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.
Franklin 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| the Netherlands boys | Franklin | 1,318 | 2,900 |
| Finland boys | Franklin | 17 | 37 |
| the Netherlands girls | Franklin | — | 13 |
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 Franklin lives in Spain
Not a count of births but of people: 646 men called Franklin 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
| Province | Spelling | People | Per thousand | Place there |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Santa Cruz de Tenerife | Franklin | 41 | 0.077 | 1,112 |
| Araba/Álava | Franklin | 9 | 0.053 | 1,107 |
| Madrid | Franklin | 174 | 0.051 | 1,069 |
| Balears, Illes | Franklin | 31 | 0.050 | 1,194 |
| Salamanca | Franklin | 7 | 0.044 | 982 |
| Navarra | Franklin | 13 | 0.038 | 1,444 |
Listed in 26 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 26 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
Franklin 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.