Humanverse

Karma

Karma reached its high-water mark in 2009 at number 760, and has been recorded 7,863 times in all. In 2025 it ranked 1,703rd. About 7,300 Karmas are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 16.

Popularity, 1880–2025

Births per year, 1880 to 2025 0 100 200 300 400 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

girls named Karma boys named Karma

By the numbers

Total US births
7,863
Estimated living today
7,300
Median age today
16
Peak year
2009
Best rank
760th
Rank in 2025
1,703rd
First recorded
1915
Girls / boys
7,593 / 270

How old the living Karmas are

Born with the name each year, and how many of them are alive today, 1880 to 2025 0 100 200 300 400 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

born that year still alive today

Of the 7,863 babies given the name since 1915, about 7,300 are alive — 93 in every hundred. Roughly 4,300 of them are children and 490 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 2009 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 Karma is most common

Relative to how many babies each state records, Karma is most concentrated in Utah (7.2×), Indiana (1.8×), Georgia (1.8×), Oklahoma (1.7×).

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

Names of 2009

The most popular girls’ names the year Karma peaked:

All the names of 2009

Karma elsewhere

CountrySpelling BirthsBest rank
England and Wales girls Karma 146 1,854th
France girls Karma 35 6,347th
England and Wales boys Karma 18 4,001st
France boys Karma 10 4,787th

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.

Karma 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 Karma 14 24
Finland boys Karma 6

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

Karma against another name

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

Compare Karma with a name of your own

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.