Surnames

The 50 most common

How far a few names go

American surnames are far more concentrated than the size of the file suggests. Of the 298.9 million people the census counted a surname for:

• the 10 most common 4.7%
• the 100 most common 16.8%
• the 1,000 most common 39.7%
• the 10,000 most common 66.0%

Measured against everyone the census placed under a surname, which is more people than this file names: a surname too rare to publish is still counted in that total. Everyone outside the 10,000 most common is spread across the remaining 146,621 names in the file, or holds one too rare to be in it at all.

Names that go both ways

Surnames that are also given names, most common surname first. Each one has two pages on this site and they are counting different things: the surname page is people alive at the 2020 census, the given-name page is babies registered since 1880.

The bottom of the file

The Census describes this file as the surnames held by 100 people or more, and that is the line that decides whether a name has a page here at all. It is also why a name you know can be missing: not that nobody has it, but that too few people do for the count to be published.

The floor is not quite exact. 617 of the published names come in below it, the smallest at 92 people. The file does not say why, so this does not guess.