Michelle

Popularity, 1880–2025

girls named Michelle boys named Michelle

By the numbers

Total US births

819,760

Estimated living today

764,000

Median age today

50

Peak year

1969

Best rank

2nd

Rank in 2025

465th

First recorded

1915

Girls / boys

816,510 / 3,250

How old the living Michelles are

born that year still alive today

Of the 819,760 babies given the name since 1915, about 764,000 are alive — 93 in every hundred. Roughly 28,000 of them are children and 50,000 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 Hebrew

feminine form of French Michel (“Michael”), Hebrew מִיכָאֵל (“who is like God?”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Notable Michelles

• Michelle Obama (born 1964)lawyer and former First Lady of the United States
• Michelle Bachelet (born 1951)president of Chile from (2006–2010; 2014–2018)
• Michelle Pfeiffer (born 1958)American actress
• Michelle Rodriguez (born 1978)American actress
• Michelle Yeoh (born 1962)Malaysian actress
• Michelle Williams (born 1980)American actress
• Sarah Michelle Gellar (born 1977)American actress
• Michelle Trachtenberg (1985–2025)American actress

People named Michelle with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).

Where Michelle is most common

• CA115,051
• NY69,822
• TX49,311
• IL47,797
• OH44,293
• PA40,193
• MI39,758
• FL29,850
• NJ25,296
• MA25,008

Relative to how many babies each state records, Michelle is most concentrated in Alaska (1.6×), Hawaii (1.4×), the District of Columbia (1.4×), California (1.4×).

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

Names of 1969

The most popular girls’ names the year Michelle peaked:

• Lisa
• Michelle
• Jennifer
• Kimberly
• Melissa
• Amy

All the names of 1969

Michelle elsewhere

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.

Michelle: births by region

Parts of a country counted above, not extra births. The share is what makes the regions comparable: they differ in size by a factor of three hundred.

By canton, Michelle is most concentrated in Ticino, where 0.32% of children were given it – 199 of them.

Michelle: rank by region

In 2025, Michelle was given 5 times or more in 2 regions of Belgium.

In 2023, Michelle was among the 10 most common names in 1 region of Italy.

In 2025, Michelle was given 2 times or more in 9 regions of Poland.

In 2025, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Michelle appears in the lists for Province of West Flanders (138th) and Brussels-Capital Region (244th).

Each of these is the top of a list the statistics office cut off somewhere – Belgium below 5 children, Italy after 10 names, Poland below 2 children – and published nothing after. So a region missing here is one where the name fell outside what was published, not one where it went unused. Places are shared where names tie, and the further down a list a place is, the more names can share it.

Michelle by city

One city over a few years, so these are much smaller numbers than the national ones above and not comparable with them.

Michelle 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.

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 Michelle lives in Spain

Not a count of births but of people: 3,610 women called Michelle were living in Spain on 1 January 2025, of every age, born in any year. Where they live is not spread evenly.

Women: the provinces where it is densest

Listed in 47 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 5 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

• Michael
• Michele
• Micheal
• Micah
• Michaela
• Mickey
• Micaela
• Michel
• Michal
• Michell
• Micaiah
• Mickie

Michelle against another name

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

• Michelle vs Michele
• Michelle vs Michael
• Michelle vs Micheal
• Michelle vs Micah
• Michelle vs Michaela
• Michelle vs Mickey

Compare Michelle with a name of your own