Stafford
Stafford reached its high-water mark in 1959 at number 1,061, and has been recorded 2,850 times in all. In 2025 it ranked 3,848th. About 1,600 Staffords are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 55.
Popularity, 1880–2025
boys named Stafford
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 2,850
- Estimated living today
- 1,600
- Median age today
- 55
- Peak year
- 1959
- Best rank
- 1,061st
- Rank in 2025
- 3,848th
- First recorded
- 1882
How old the living Staffords are
born that year still alive today
Of the 2,850 babies given the name since 1882, about 1,600 are alive — 57 in every hundred. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1970 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
From Old English stæþ (“landing place”) + ford.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Staffords
- Stafford Cripps (1889–1952)British politician, lawyer and diplomat
- John Stafford Smith (1750–1836)British composer, church organist, and early musicologist
- Stafford Repp (1918–1974)American actor
- Stafford Northcote, 1st Earl of Iddesleigh (1818–1887)British politician
People named Stafford with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Stafford is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Stafford is most concentrated in Louisiana (27.8×), Virginia (10.8×), Texas (0.9×), New York (0.6×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1959
The most popular boys’ names the year Stafford peaked:
Stafford elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales boys | Stafford | 6 | 3,849th |
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
Stafford 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.