Hal
About 16,796 American babies have been named Hal since 1880, most of them around 1956. In 2025 it ranked 3,128th. About 8,400 Hals are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 67.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Hal boys named Hal
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 16,796
- Estimated living today
- 8,400
- Median age today
- 67
- Peak year
- 1956
- Best rank
- 305th
- Rank in 2025
- 3,128th
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 12 / 16,784
How old the living Hals are
born that year still alive today
Of the 16,796 babies given the name since 1880, about 8,400 are alive — 50 in every hundred. Roughly 390 of them are children and 4,800 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.
Notable Hals
- Hal Holbrook (1925–2021)American actor
- Hal Robson-Kanu (born 1989)Welsh association football player
- Hal B. Wallis (1899–1986)American film producer and art collector
- Hal Ashby (1929–1988)American film director and film editor
- Hal Roach (1892–1992)American filmmaker
- Hal Clement (1922–2003)American author
- Hal Abelson (born 1947)computer scientist
- Hal Moore (1922–2017)United States Army lieutenant general
People named Hal with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Hal is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Hal is most concentrated in Utah (5.3×), North Carolina (3.3×), Mississippi (3.1×), Idaho (2.7×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1956
The most popular boys’ names the year Hal peaked:
Hal elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales boys | Hal | 449 | 790th |
| Scotland boys | Hal | 3 | 535th |
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.
Related names
Hal 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.