NameCharted is a free baby-name research tool that turns raw government birth records into interactive trend charts. Every chart and ranking on this site is built directly from official data — no guessing, no sponsored placements, no manufactured "most popular" lists.
Our primary dataset is the U.S. Social Security Administration's (SSA) annual name release, which covers every first name given to at least five babies born in the United States in a given year, going back to 1880. We also include official records from the Office for National Statistics (England and Wales), INSEE in France, ISTAT in Italy, Statistics Canada, the Instituto Nacional de Estadística in Spain, the New South Wales and Victoria birth registries in Australia, and the Meertens Instituut's name bank in the Netherlands.
All source data is public-domain or openly licensed by the issuing agency. We process it as-is — no smoothing, no interpolation — so the numbers you see match exactly what the agencies publish.
Coverage is not equal across countries. Only the U.S. series is near-complete. The England & Wales, Australian, and Spanish sources publish ranked top-100, top-100-ish, and top-50 lists respectively, so less common names are absent entirely — and the Dutch series has not been updated since 2017. The methodology page sets out the exact years and depth for every country.
Name data reflects registered births, not the full population. Very rare names (fewer than five births in a year) are suppressed by the SSA for privacy reasons and do not appear in the data. Rankings are calculated separately for boys and girls within each country and year. Spelling variants are treated as separate names — "Aidan" and "Aiden" each have their own trend line.
The enrichment data (meanings, origins, famous bearers) is sourced from publicly available encyclopedic references and is provided for informational purposes. Numerology readings are a playful feature, not a scientific analysis.
We update the dataset each year when the SSA and partner agencies publish their annual release, typically in May. U.S. data currently covers births through 2024. Other countries run to different end years — Australia to 2025, the Netherlands only to 2017 — as listed on the methodology page.
NameCharted is built and maintained by JP, a solo developer. There is no company, newsroom, or editorial staff behind it — one person writes the code that ingests the government datasets, builds the charts, and publishes every page on this site.
The site started as a personal project: the existing baby-name sites were full of invented rankings, unsourced "meanings", and lists that changed depending on who was paying. The goal here is narrower and duller — take the official birth records, show exactly what they say, and be clear about where every number comes from.
NameCharted is free to use and funded personally. The site carries no sponsored placements and no paid inclusion — no one can pay to have a name featured, ranked higher, or described more favourably. If advertising is added in future, it will be clearly labelled as advertising and kept separate from the data and the commentary.
Found an error, or disagree with something written here? Corrections are genuinely welcome — email hello@namecharted.com and include the name, country, and year so it can be checked against the source. For the full detail on how the data is processed, see the methodology page.