Payton
The girl's name Payton has been in the national records since 1880, with 84,784 births to its name. It is given to both boys and girls. In 2025 it ranked 440th. About 83,000 Paytons are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 17.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Payton boys named Payton
Girls and boys called Payton
years more girls than boys years more boys than girls
Payton crossed from boys to girls in 1992, having already crossed in 1967, and has stayed there for 34 of the years counted since. At its furthest it was 89% girls, which is roughly where it still is.
The girls’ share of each year’s babies of the name, in the 51 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
- 84,784
- Estimated living today
- 83,000
- Median age today
- 17
- Peak year
- 2009
- Best rank
- 84th
- Rank in 2025
- 440th
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 60,045 / 24,739
How old the living Paytons are
born that year still alive today
Of the 84,784 babies given the name since 1880, about 83,000 are alive — 98 in every hundred. Roughly 44,000 of them are children and 180 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 2008 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
Habitational surname from a minor place in Sussex, from the Old English personal name Pǣga + tūn (“enclosure; settlement, town”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Paytons
- Payton Pritchard (born 1998)American basketball player
People named Payton with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Payton is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Payton is most concentrated in Idaho (2.5×), Utah (2.2×), Nevada (1.9×), Washington (1.8×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 2009
The most popular girls’ names the year Payton peaked:
Payton elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales girls | Payton | 955 | 521st |
| Scotland girls | Payton | 310 | 171st |
| England and Wales boys | Payton | 106 | 1,786th |
| France girls | Payton | 50 | 5,599th |
| New Zealand girls | Payton | 44 | 96th |
| Northern Ireland girls | Payton | 12 | 324th |
| Ireland girls | Payton | 3 | 896th |
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
Payton 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.