Kelley
About 52,385 American babies have been named Kelley since 1882, most of them around 1968. In 2025 it ranked 7,133rd. About 47,000 Kelleys are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 50.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Kelley boys named Kelley
Girls and boys called Kelley
years more girls than boys years more boys than girls
Kelley crossed from boys to girls in 1954, and has stayed there for 71 of the years counted since. At its furthest it was 95% girls, and in 2024 it was 68%.
The girls’ share of each year’s babies of the name, in the 102 years in which at least 25 babies got it. The line touches the middle more often than there are crossings marked: a year or two on the other side is not a name changing hands, and only a move that holds for 5 counted years and reaches 60/40 is recorded as one. All 581 names that changed sex.
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 52,385
- Estimated living today
- 47,000
- Median age today
- 50
- Peak year
- 1968
- Best rank
- 168th
- Rank in 2025
- 7,133rd
- First recorded
- 1882
- Girls / boys
- 46,099 / 6,286
How old the living Kelleys are
born that year still alive today
Of the 52,385 babies given the name since 1882, about 47,000 are alive — 90 in every hundred. Roughly 840 of them are children and 3,700 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1975 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
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Kelleys
- Kelley O'Hara (born 1988)American soccer player
- Kelley Hurley (born 1988)American épée fencer
- Kelley Armstrong (born 1968)Canadian writer
- Kelley Deal (born 1961)American musician
- Kelley Law (born 1966)Canadian female curler
- Kelley Mack (1992–2025)American actress
People named Kelley with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Kelley is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Kelley is most concentrated in New Hampshire (2.6×), Vermont (2.2×), Maine (2.2×), Massachusetts (1.7×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1968
The most popular girls’ names the year Kelley peaked:
Kelley elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ireland girls | Kelley | 229 | 258th |
| Scotland girls | Kelley | 28 | 369th |
| England and Wales girls | Kelley | 10 | 2,096th |
| England and Wales boys | Kelley | 6 | 4,527th |
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
Kelley 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.