Hamilton

At the 2020 census, 194,450 Americans bore the surname Hamilton — 122nd out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 1,537.

By the numbers

People: 194,450
Rank: 122nd
How common: 1 in 1,537
Per 100,000: 65.1

Where the name comes from

Origin Old English

From Old English *Hameldūne, from hamel (“blunt, flat-topped”) + dūne (“hill”). The Scottish surname is from the place in Leicestershire. The dollar-bill sense is from the portrait of Alexander Hamilton featured on it.

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

Who bears the name

How people with the surname Hamilton described their own race and Hispanic origin at the 2020 census:

White, not Hispanic 67.5%
Black, not Hispanic 23.2%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 4.4%
Hispanic or Latino 3.5%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 0.7%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 0.7%

Notable people called Hamilton

Lewis Hamilton (born 1985)British racing driver
Alexander Hamilton (1757–1804)American Founding Father and statesman (1755/1757–1804)
William Rowan Hamilton (1805–1865)Irish mathematician and astronomer
Linda Hamilton (born 1956)American actress
Margaret Hamilton (born 1936)American NASA scientist and mathematician
Hamilton Smith (1931–2025)American microbiologist
Guy Hamilton (1922–2016)English film director
George Hamilton (born 1939)American film and television actor

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

Surnames like Hamilton

Also a first name

Hamilton has been given to 6,517 American babies as a first name since 1880, peaking in 2016. See it as a given name.

Try it on yourself

Source: US Census Bureau, Frequently Occurring Surnames, 2020. The Census describes the file as the surnames borne by 100 or more people; rarer names are not published. The line is not quite exact, and 617 published names come in under it, the smallest at 92 people. Race and Hispanic origin are self-reported. Rates are worked out against the 298.9 million people the file's own figures are calculated on, which is fewer than the census counted in all: the difference is everyone whose surname was too rare to publish.