The State of Baby Names, 2026
The fastest-falling popular boys' name in America right now is Gavin. In 2015 it was given to about one in every 640 boys. By 2024 that had fallen by nearly three quarters. Brayden, Brandon, and Brantley are close behind, each down roughly two thirds over the same stretch. Look at what those four names have in common and you find the single clearest story in a decade of American birth data: the -n boy is in retreat.
We pulled the full Social Security birth record for every year from 2015 through 2024 — every name given to at least five children, both sexes, ranked by share of all births — and went looking for the shifts that a top-ten list hides. A top-ten list tells you Liam and Olivia are winning. It does not tell you that the kind of name parents reach for is changing underneath them. That's the more interesting story, and the data tells it plainly.
The end of the -n era
For fifteen years the dominant shape of an American boy's name was two syllables ending in -n. Aiden, Jayden, Mason, Logan, Brayden — the so-called "-aydens" defined the 2000s and early 2010s so completely that they became a punchline. The punchline is now a retreat. Names ending in -n accounted for nearly 17% of all boys born in 2015. By 2024 that share had dropped almost 20% — one of the largest structural moves in the entire dataset, and it holds whether you look at the whole pool of -n names or just the most popular ones.
This isn't a few names falling. It's a sound going out of fashion. The hard nasal stop that closes Gavin or Brandon is being quietly traded for something softer and more open — which is exactly where the data goes next.
The vowel decade
If -n is the sound parents are leaving, the open vowel is the sound they're moving toward. Names ending in a vowel — Mia, Luca, Aria, Theo, Eva — rose more than 12% as a share of all births between 2015 and 2024. It is the largest single shift in the way American names sound, and it cuts across both sexes. Girls' names have long leaned vowel-final; what's new is the boys. Luca, Theo, Leo, and Matteo are doing for this decade what the -aydens did for the last one, and they end on a breath rather than a stop.
There's a tidy irony in the numbers. The one consonant family that's also climbing is the hard-stop ending — Atlas, Knox, the -k and -t and -x names — up about 11%. So the middle is hollowing out. Parents increasingly want a name that either lands soft and singing (Theo) or lands hard and decisive (Knox). The mushy nasal in the middle — the -n — is what they're abandoning.
The megahits are deflating
A name can sit near the top of the chart and still be falling, because rank measures position while share measures momentum, and the two come apart at the peak. Olivia has been the number-one girls' name for years, yet its share of births has slipped every year since 2019. Ava, long a fixture of the top ten, has lost roughly 40% of its birth-share since 2017 — one of the steepest declines of any name still in the top twenty.
The pattern repeats one tier down, where the 2000s favorites are deflating fastest. Aubrey, Alexis, and Taylor are each down about two thirds since 2015. These were the names that felt fresh when today's new parents were teenagers, which is precisely the problem: a name that peaks with one generation reads as dated to the next. The deflation of the megahits isn't a knock on the names. It's the ordinary half-life of a name that got too popular too fast.
Grandma and grandpa are back, with receipts
The names rising to replace them are, improbably, the oldest ones in the book. We found 92 names that peaked before the year 2000 and are now climbing again — the full vintage-revival cohort, with the birth records to prove it. Ophelia, which peaked in the 1900s, is up nearly 390% in a decade. Millie — a name whose high-water mark was the 1880s — is up over 370%. Florence, Eloise, Arthur, Otto, Mabel, Elsie: every one of them was your great-grandparent's name, and every one is rising.
This is the "hundred-year rule" in action — a name needs to age out of living memory before it can feel fresh again. The names coming back now are the ones that belonged to people being born when the chart began. The grandparents of the 2010s revival (Hazel, Eleanor, Henry) have already arrived; the great-grandparents (Ophelia, Florence, Opal) are the leading edge now.
The names that never left
Against all this churn, a small set of names simply refuses to move. We counted 145 names still ranked in the top 1,000 today that peaked before 1960 and have never fully left it. Emma and William and Henry and Elizabeth all peaked in the 1880s — the first decade of the record — and all four are top-60 names in 2024. James (peak: 1940s), Jack (1920s), Eleanor (1910s), Violet (1900s): these are the names that have outlasted every fashion cycle by never fully riding one.
If you want a name that will sound neither dated nor trendy when your child is forty, this list — not the current top ten — is where to look. Durability is a measurable property, and these names have a century of it.
The accelerators
Finally, the names moving fastest right now, the ones to watch. Lainey is up nearly tenfold in a decade, carried partly by a country-music star and partly by the broader -ey-ending wave. Theo (+500%), Atlas (+528%), Luka (+608%), and Callum (+582%) are the boys leading the vowel-and-hard-stop shift described above — short, modern, ending decisively in either direction. Their rise and the -aydens' fall are the same story told from opposite ends.
How to read your own name's curve
The practical lesson in all of this is that a single number — a name's rank this year — tells you almost nothing about where it's headed. Olivia at number one and Ava in the top twenty are both falling; Theo outside the top hundred is climbing faster than either. What matters is the slope, not the spot.
So when you're weighing a name, find its ten-year curve, not just its current rank. A name rising into popularity and a name sliding out of it can occupy the same position on the chart in the same year, and they will feel completely different by the time your child starts school. The shape of the line is the part that predicts the future. The number on top is just where it happens to be passing through.
Methodology: figures are drawn from US Social Security Administration national birth data, 2015–2024, covering every name given to at least five children in a year. "Share of births" is each name's count as a proportion of all births that year, which lets names be compared across a decade in which the total number of births changed. Percentage changes compare 2015 to 2024. Peak decade is computed across the full SSA record back to 1880.