Which Baby Names Are Rising — and in Which Countries

If you want one answer: Noah. In 2025 it was the number one boys' name in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and most of Australia, number two in France, England and Wales, and the United States. No other name in the world is simultaneously that high in that many unrelated registries.

But the more interesting finding in the 2025 data is not which name won. It is that winning stopped meaning much. Fifty years ago the ten most popular American boys' names covered 25.6% of all boys born. In 2025 they covered 7.4%. The top of the chart is now the least informative part of it.

This article is built from national birth registries — the agencies that actually record the names — for the most recent year each one publishes. Every number below carries its source and its year, because in this subject a two-year-old number is often simply wrong.

The short answer: who was #1 in 2025

Counts are omitted where the publishing agency reports rank without a per-name count, or rounds them. INSEE rounds every count to the nearest multiple of 5; GfdS reports shares, not counts.

Noah is the closest thing the world has to a global #1

Noah's spread is the strongest cross-border story in the current data, and it is not an artefact of one agency's method — it shows up independently in registries that count differently and speak different languages.

• Germany (GfdS, 2025): Noah is #1 among boys and, at 1.48% of all first names given, the single most-given name in the country across both sexes.
• Netherlands (SVB, 2025): Noah is #1 for the seventh consecutive year, given to 883 boys — though notably down from 922 in 2024.
• Sweden (Skatteverket, 2025): Noah is #1 for the third year running, 640 boys.
• Australia (state BDM registries, 2025): Noah led in almost every state and territory. In Victoria it took #1 with 511 registrations, ending Oliver's eleven-year run.
• France (INSEE, published 16 July 2026): Noah climbed to #2 with 3,465, pushing Raphaël and Louis down.
• United States (SSA, 2025) and England & Wales (ONS, 2025): #2 in both.

Why this name? Honest answer: nobody has demonstrated a cause. The plausible ingredients — it is short, it ends in a vowel sound, it crosses the Christian/Muslim/Jewish line (Noah/Nuh), and it survives being pronounced in German, Dutch, Swedish, French and English without mangling — are descriptions of the winner, not proof of why it won. Anyone offering you a confident causal story about Noah is guessing.

The fastest risers are mostly spellings, not names

The SSA publishes an explicit fastest-riser ranking, which makes the United States the only country where "which name jumped most" has a hard answer. For 2025:

Kasai — glossed by the SSA as "fire" in Japanese and Swahili — entered the top 1,000 for the first time. Klarity led all girls' risers. Alongside them: Rynlee, Ailanny, Naylani, Madisson for girls; Akari, Eziah, Jasai, Neithan for boys.

Look at that list closely. Klarity is Clarity. Madisson is Madison. Ailanny is the 2024 riser Ailany, which itself sat beside near-identical risers Aylani and Analeia in that year's table. The SSA does not merge spellings: Caitlin, Caitlyn, Kaitlin, Kaitlyn, Katelyn and Katelynn each get a separate rank. So a "fastest-rising name" is frequently a redistribution inside a name that already existed — parents respelling to make a common name feel uncommon.

This has a direct consequence for the diversity numbers in the next section: some measured variety is orthography, not phonetics. The real concentration of sounds is higher than the ranked tables show. Nobody publishes a phonetically merged US ranking, so the size of that gap is unknown.

Muhammad tops England & Wales — and the same rule cuts the other way

Muhammad was the #1 boys' name in England and Wales in 2025 with 5,957 births (ONS, released 9 July 2026), holding the top spot it took in 2023. In 2024 it was 5,721 — a 23% increase on 2023.

The ONS uses the same no-merging rule as the SSA, and here it produces the opposite distortion. In the 2024 data, Mohammed ranked #21 separately (1,760 babies) and Mohammad #53 — the same name appears three times in one top 100. So Muhammad's #1 is real under the stated rule, and simultaneously an undercount of how many boys were named after the Prophet. Both statements are true at once. The ONS defends the rule on the grounds that merging requires subjective judgement calls; that is a reasonable position, not a neutral one.

Regionally (ONS, 2024), Muhammad was #1 in five of nine English regions: the North West, Yorkshire and The Humber, West Midlands, London and the East Midlands.

Eliana: one name, two countries, the same year

The single cleanest cross-border riser in the 2025 data:

• United States (SSA, 2025): Eliana debuted in the top 10, knocking out Ava.
• England & Wales (ONS, 2025): Eliana jumped 54 places — the biggest rise of any girls' name that year — into the top 100 for the first time.

Two registries, two populations, one year, no shared mechanism. Also entering the England and Wales girls' top 100 for the first time: Gracie, Alba and Lyla. Dropping out: Ellie, Amelie and Jessica.

The classics are being evicted, one country at a time

2025 was unusually hard on incumbents:

• United States (SSA): Ava fell out of the top 10 entirely. Charlotte took #2, ending Emma's six-year run as runner-up. In 2024, Luna had dropped out of the top 10, replaced by Sofia entering at #10 for the first time.
• Germany (GfdS): Ben — top 10 for over a decade — fell to #13, its first time out since 2011. Short names replaced it: Theo and Emil rose.
• Sweden (Skatteverket): Alma, #1 in 2024, fell to #6. Vera leapt from 5th to 1st (605); Astrid from 8th to 2nd (523). William, the country's most popular name overall in 2022, is down to 8th.
• France (INSEE): Emma slid from 5th to 7th; Anna left the top 10; Adèle entered at 9th (2,225).
• Australia (Victoria BDM): Isla, 2024's winner, fell to 5th (309).

The unisex names, measured rather than asserted

"Unisex names are on the rise" is one of the most-repeated claims in name coverage and one of the least-sourced. The Dutch SVB is unusual in publishing the actual split, so for 2025 the balance can be checked instead of assumed:

Robin is as close to a genuine 50/50 name as a registry is likely to produce. But note what this does not show: a trend. It is a snapshot of balance in one year, not evidence that these names are becoming more unisex over time — that would need the same split across a run of years, which the SVB does not publish in this form. The balance is real; the direction of travel is not established by this table, and most articles that cite numbers like these quietly claim it anyway.

The real story: the top 10 stopped mattering

This is the trend that outranks every individual name, and the SSA's own long series is the best evidence for it.

Supporting figures from the same direction: the top 1,000 names covered over 90% of US births in 1973 and about 72% in 2025. Distinct names given rose from just over 14,000 in 1973 to nearly 29,000 in 2023.

It is not a US quirk. In Germany, the ten most popular first names account for roughly 10% of all first names recorded (GfdS, 2025) — and GfdS does merge spelling variants, so that 10% is a phonetically honest number, unlike the American one.

The practical implication: "Olivia is the #1 name" and "Olivia is a common name" are no longer the same claim. Olivia has been #1 in England and Wales for ten consecutive years (ONS, 2025) — while representing a fraction of births that would not have made the top 10 in 1975.

Rising ≠ common: what a population actually looks like

Here is the distinction most baby-name coverage collapses. A birth-year ranking tells you what parents did last year. It tells you almost nothing about who lives in the country.

Sweden's registry of tilltalsnamn — the name a person is actually called, exactly one per person — makes the point. As of 31 December 2022 (SCB), among all living Swedish men:

Ali at #71 is not a baby-name trend. It is population composition — decades of accumulated migration, visible in a snapshot of the living. Meanwhile Noah, #1 among Swedish newborns for three years running, is nowhere near the top of the living-population list, because a name given to 640 babies a year cannot outweigh 81,754 Larses in a single generation. The two rankings answer different questions, and are routinely quoted as if they answered the same one.

Where the data comes from

Data as of 2026-07-17. Every figure above traces to a national registry:

Three cautions worth stating plainly:

• Sweden's source changed. SCB stopped producing name statistics after 2024; Skatteverket now publishes newborn names. They count differently — SCB merged similar spellings, Skatteverket counts each spelling separately — so figures are not comparable across the handover.
• The Dutch list is not from CBS. It comes from the SVB, the agency that pays child benefit, which is why it sees newborn names at all. It shows only names given 10+ times.
• Ukraine and Germany publish findings, not data. The Ukrainian Ministry of Justice releases rankings via press statement with no downloadable file and no methodology note. GfdS surveys registry offices — 749 of them in 2025, covering ~91% of names given — which is excellent coverage but is still a sample, not a census.

Sites such as Behind the Name, Nameberry and first-name.net are aggregators and commercial products, not registries. Where they carry national figures, those figures came from the agencies above, usually without the methodology notes that make them interpretable. None of the numbers in this article come from them.

One honest note about our own generator

Our name generator draws on these same national registries, which is why common names come up often in it: names are weighted by real-world frequency. That matters more than it sounds — before weighting, the genuine top-10 first names turned up in just 0.6% of generated en_US cards, 1.7% for uk_UA and 2.0% for de_DE, against 20–40% in life; after weighting, uk_UA reached 26.9% from the identical set of 603 names. But outside the ten locales that ship birth-decade cohorts it models living bearers of all ages, not births by year — registries of the living carry no age breakdown, so a name that only took off in the 2010s is, if anything, overweighted on our adult cards. Nothing in this article's trend data comes from our database; it comes from the registries listed above.