Kim

At the 2020 census, 274,068 Americans bore the surname Kim — 71st out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 1,091.

By the numbers

People: 274,068
Rank: 71st
How common: 1 in 1,091
Per 100,000: 91.7

Where the name comes from

Origin Korean

From Korean ^김(金).

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

Who bears the name

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

Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 93.8%
White, not Hispanic 2.5%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 2.5%
Hispanic or Latino 0.9%
Black, not Hispanic 0.3%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 0.02%

Notable people called Kim

Kim Jong-un (born 1984)Supreme Leader of North Korea since 2011
Kim Il-sung (1912–1994)Supreme Leader of North Korea from 1948 to 1994
Kim Jong-il (1941–2011)Supreme Leader of North Korea from 1994 to 2011
Kim Dae-jung (1924–2009)8th President of the Republic of Korea
Kim Young-sam (1927–2015)President of South Korea from 1993 to 1998
Kim Ki-duk (1960–2020)South Korean film director
Kim Yo-jong (born 1987)North Korean politician and diplomat, sister of Kim Jong Un
Kim Jong-nam (1971–2017)Oldest son of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il

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

Surnames like Kim

Also a first name

Kim has been given to 214,768 American babies as a first name since 1912, peaking in 1960. 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.