Popular Baby Names by Birth Year
Pick any year between 1880 and 2025 to see the top 10 most-popular US boys' and girls' names that year, sourced directly from US Social Security Administration records. See how each name ranks today vs back then.
Top 10 in 1995
SSA-ranked top 10 most popular names. The "today" column shows the same name's 2025 rank for context.
Boys
| #1 | Michael | 41,410 births | today: #21 |
| #2 | Matthew | 32,879 births | today: #32 |
| #3 | Christopher | 32,677 births | today: #68 |
| #4 | Jacob | 31,134 births | today: #43 |
| #5 | Joshua | 30,720 births | today: #66 |
| #6 | Nicholas | 29,161 births | today: #112 |
| #7 | Tyler | 29,160 births | today: #220 |
| #8 | Brandon | 26,904 births | today: #261 |
| #9 | Daniel | 26,727 births | today: #22 |
| #10 | Austin | 25,907 births | today: #113 |
Girls
| #1 | Jessica | 27,939 births | today: #665 |
| #2 | Ashley | 26,606 births | today: #164 |
| #3 | Emily | 24,383 births | today: #34 |
| #4 | Samantha | 21,645 births | today: #151 |
| #5 | Sarah | 21,394 births | today: #90 |
| #6 | Taylor | 20,426 births | today: #403 |
| #7 | Hannah | 17,018 births | today: #56 |
| #8 | Brittany | 16,477 births | today: #928 |
| #9 | Amanda | 16,354 births | today: #493 |
| #10 | Elizabeth | 16,192 births | today: #17 |
Want a deeper dive?
- 📅 Full 1995 retrospective — top 20 + year-over-year movers + names that emerged that year
- 🇺🇸 Baby names by US state — see 1995 top 10 for any of the 51 states
- 📊 1990s decade overview — context for surrounding years
- 📚 State of Baby Naming 2026 — flagship 145-year retrospective
Source: US Social Security Administration Beyond the Top 1000 Names dataset (1880–2025), public domain (CC0).
SSA suppresses any name-year-gender combination with fewer than 5 occurrences for privacy, and pre-1936 records are partial.
See the full methodology page for complete details.