Pete
The boy's name Pete has been in the national records since 1880, with 43,700 births to its name. In 2025 it ranked 2,363rd. About 19,000 Petes are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 62.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Pete boys named Pete
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 43,700
- Estimated living today
- 19,000
- Median age today
- 62
- Peak year
- 1959
- Best rank
- 285th
- Rank in 2025
- 2,363rd
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 170 / 43,530
How old the living Petes are
born that year still alive today
Of the 43,700 babies given the name since 1880, about 19,000 are alive — 44 in every hundred. Roughly 1,100 of them are children and 8,300 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1963 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 Petes
- Pete Seeger (1919–2014)American folk singer
- Pete Sampras (born 1971)American tennis player
- Pete Buttigieg (born 1982)American politician
- Pete Hegseth (born 1980)United States Secretary of Defense
- Pete Conrad (1930–1999)American astronaut and lunar explorer
- Pete Townshend (born 1945)British musician
- Pete Best (born 1941)British musician, former member of the Beatles
- Pete Postlethwaite (1946–2011)English character actor
People named Pete with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Pete is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Pete is most concentrated in New Mexico (8.2×), Colorado (3.1×), Arizona (2.9×), Texas (2.7×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1959
The most popular boys’ names the year Pete peaked:
Pete elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales boys | Pete | 41 | 3,227th |
| Ireland boys | Pete | 6 | 720th |
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.
Pete 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 boys | Pete | 313 | 350 |
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
Pete 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.