UK baby names dataset, 1996 to 2025

• Source files. One ONS file per sex per year, 1996 to 2025, using the full list of every name given to 3 or more babies. We use the single-year files, because the consolidated ONS workbook leaves out some names for 2025.
• Counts under 3 are not published by the ONS, so a missing year means fewer than 3 babies, not zero. We never show or estimate lower values.
• Rank follows the ONS: names with the same count share a rank and the next rank is skipped.
• 1 in X and share divide the babies given a name by the births of that sex in the year, taken from the twelve monthly totals in the ONS file (they match the ONS births dataset: 300,715 boys and 284,681 girls in 2025). One monthly total is missing from the girls’ 1998 file, so no share is shown for girls that year.
• Two monthly totals that look wrong in the ONS files. In the girls’ 2013 file the April total repeats May’s, which puts that year about 1,360 too high; in the boys’ 2016 file the September total repeats October’s, which puts that year about 932 too low (checked against the ONS births dataset). We use the totals as ONS published them, so 1 in X for girls in 2013 and boys in 2016 is out by less than half of one per cent.
• Spelling. The ONS counts each exact spelling separately and does not group names. We do the same, so Olive and Olivia are different names. Accents are removed by all three publishers.
• Similar names and the changes over 5, 10, 20 and 29 years are our calculations, and are labelled as ours. Similar names are those whose share of births has moved most like the name’s own since 1996.
• The three nations. England and Wales (ONS) count births in the calendar year; Scotland (NRS) and Northern Ireland (NISRA) count births registered in the year. They are shown side by side and never added up.
• A known oddity. The ONS figures for the most popular girls’ names jump in 2012 (for example Amelia: 5,054 in 2011, 7,061 in 2012, 5,570 in 2013). We have not been able to establish why, so we flag changes for 2011 to 2013.
• Checks. Every build recomputes the totals and several known values from the files and fails if they do not match.

Source files and licence: ONS release, NRS, NISRA. Last built 2026-10-09.