10 Boy Names Falling Fastest in the US (2020 → 2024)

June 5, 2026

For every name climbing the chart there's another sliding the other way. We pulled the boy names that were inside the US top 300 in 2020 and ranked them by how many places they fell by 2024. The drops are sharp.

The list

1. Brantley — from #233 in 2020 to #480 in 2024 (−247). The country-pop wave that pushed Brantley up through the 2010s has clearly turned.
2. King — from #171 to #342 (−171). The grand-noun trend (King, Royal, Reign) cooled fast.
3. Kobe — from #239 to #409 (−170). The post-2020 surge is over.
4. Chance — from #279 to #418 (−139). Word names are still in fashion, but Chance specifically lost steam.
5. Karson — from #265 to #397 (−132). The "K-spelling for hard-C names" wave (Karson, Kameron, Kyler) is receding across the board.
6. Kameron — from #300 to #428 (−128). Same pattern.
7. Daxton — from #288 to #411 (−123). A 2010s coinage that's settling.
8. Khalil — from #275 to #390 (−115).
9. Kyler — from #244 to #357 (−113). Another K-spelling casualty.
10. Gavin — from #142 to #255 (−113). Gavin peaked at #28 in 2009 and has been drifting down ever since.

What's the pattern?

A few themes show up across the list:

• K-respellings are out. Karson, Kameron, Kyler, Khalil — four of the ten. Parents who want the same sound are increasingly choosing the original spelling (Carson, Cameron, Kyle) or skipping the name entirely.
• Mid-2010s coinages are aging. Brantley, Daxton — names that felt fresh ten years ago are sliding as the cohort that named the first wave moves on.
• Grand-noun names cooled. King and Chance fall here; Royal, Reign, and Legend are also down from their 2020 peaks (though not enough to make this specific cut).

A drop of 100–250 places doesn't mean a name is gone — it just means it's no longer the rocket it was. Many of these will stabilise in the 300–500 band for years.

If you want the rising side of the same chart, see our Top 10 rising boy names of 2024.

Data: U.S. Social Security Administration 2020 and 2024 releases. Only names ranked inside the top 300 in 2020 were considered, to avoid noise from low-volume names where a small absolute change can produce a huge rank delta.