The Fastest-Rising Baby Names of 2025 (and the Top 20), From the New SSA Data

Every spring the Social Security Administration publishes the names given to babies born in the U.S. the year before. The 2025 list came out on May 8, 2026, and most headlines stopped at the same two words: Olivia and Liam, again. That's true, and it's the least interesting thing in the file.

We downloaded the full national data (every name given to at least five babies of one sex) and went through it the way you would if you were choosing a name right now. Which names are about to be everywhere? Which ones are quietly fading? And how many classmates is your favorite likely to have? Here's what we found.

The 2025 top 10, and what moved

Olivia has been the #1 girls' name since 2019 and Liam the #1 boys' name since 2017, and 2025 didn't change that. But both lost ground: 1,228 fewer baby Olivias than in 2024 and 1,434 fewer Liams. They're still comfortably ahead, just less dominant than they were.

Three things stand out:

• Charlotte climbed from #4 to #2. It added about 800 babies while most of the top 10 shrank, and it's now only 144 births behind Olivia. If that gap keeps closing, 2026 could have a new #1 girls' name for the first time since 2019.
• Eliana entered the top 10 from #18, with 1,744 more babies than the year before. Only one girls' name in the whole file gained more: Ailany (more on her below).
• Henry passed James for #5 on the boys' side, and Theodore held #4 after a climb that took it from about 4,200 babies in 2015 to 13,355 in 2025.

Ava, a fixture of the top 10 for years, slipped to #11. Luna, which looked unstoppable a few years ago, fell from #13 to #27.

The fastest-rising names of 2025

"Fastest rising" can mean two different things, so we'll show both. The first is how many places a name climbed, which is where tiny names make huge jumps. The second is how many more babies got the name, which tells you what you'll actually hear on the playground.

Biggest jumps in rank: girls

These are from the SSA's official table of names that climbed the most within the top 1,000.

Klarity went from 87 babies to 344. That's still rare (fewer than one per 4,000 girls born), but it's the kind of curve that tends to keep going. Liora, at 295 girls, has more than doubled since 2023.

Biggest jumps in rank: boys

Kasai is the standout: 95 boys in 2024, 437 in 2025. Brewer, Syaire and the surname-style Landry are in the same rising group.

The names that gained the most babies

This is the list that matters if you're worried about popularity, because a jump from 87 to 344 babies is less noticeable in real life than a jump of thousands.

Just outside this list: Ailani (+857), Eloise (+808), Charlotte (+803) and Lucy (+751).

A few of these deserve a closer look:

• Ailany jumped from #101 to #14. In 2023 only 311 girls got the name; in 2025, 7,136 did. Nothing else in the 2025 data comes close to that speed.
• Eithan went from #226 to #97, the only name of either sex to break into the top 100 from outside the top 150.
• Cooper (#50 to #27) and Bennett (#60 to #40) are the friendly, surname-style names many parents describe as "classic but not stuffy". The data says plenty of other parents feel the same way.
• Elias (#25 to #13) and Luca (#23 to #14) are both closing in on the top 10.

The "-lani" wave is the biggest trend of the year

Ailany isn't a one-off. Look at every girls' name ending in -lani, -lany or -lanny (Leilani, Kehlani, Alani, Ailani, Kaylani, Milani and dozens of spellings) and the total looks like this:

That's more than four times the 2015 number, in a decade when the total number of births went down. In 2025 about one girl in every 43 in the SSA data got a name from this family. If you love the sound, go for it, but expect your daughter to share the ending with a few classmates, even if her exact spelling is rare.

The names that are cooling off

Falling names are often the smartest picks: still familiar, but past their peak, so your child is less likely to be one of three in the class.

Luna is the clearest example of a name that peaked. It went from 2,809 babies in 2015 to 7,850 in 2020, held there for a few years, and has now dropped two years running. Dylan has fallen from more than 10,000 boys a year in 2015 to 6,208.

How concentrated are baby names now?

Parents often tell us they want something "not too popular". Here's the context for that worry, straight from the 2025 file:

• The SSA counted 1,607,267 girls and 1,708,076 boys with a name given at least five times, a little under 2024 (1,620,190 and 1,722,888).
• Those babies had 17,297 different girls' names and 13,930 boys' names between them.
• The top 10 names covered about 7% of girls and 8% of boys. Even Olivia went to fewer than 1 girl in 100.
• The top 1,000 covered about 74% of girls and 81% of boys. So roughly one girl in four has a name outside the top 1,000.

In other words, the "everyone is called Olivia" feeling is mostly an illusion. Variety is at a historic high. The bigger risk isn't a top-10 name. It's a fast riser like Ailany or Eithan, where a class of kids born in the same two or three years can easily include several.

What this means if you're choosing a name

Here's how we'd use the data:

1. Check the direction, not just the rank. #60 and climbing fast will feel more common in your child's class than #30 and falling. Every name page on Namelette shows the full curve. Look at Theodore next to Dylan to see the difference.
2. Watch spelling families. The -lani names, or Eithan/Ethan/Eitan, can be individually rare while the sound is everywhere.
3. Falling names make great "familiar but not trendy" picks. Names like Abigail, Emily or Aiden are easy to spell and pronounce, and they're getting less common each year.
4. Rare doesn't have to mean invented. About a quarter of girls get a name outside the top 1,000, and many of those are old names, not new spellings. Our name generator has a "Unique" style and an origin filter if you'd like to explore that way.

What's likely to happen next

We don't make predictions dressed up as facts. Trends can stall, and a single TV character can change everything. But if the 2023 to 2025 direction holds, these are the ones to watch:

• Charlotte is now 144 babies from #1, the closest any name has come to Olivia in years.
• Eliana, Elias and Luca are all rising quickly at or near the top 10.
• Ailany and the -lani family are growing faster than anything else in the data.
• Klarity, Liora and Kasai are small today but moving fast: Klarity went from 12 girls in 2023 to 344, and Kasai from 64 boys to 437.

We'll update this post when the SSA publishes the 2026 data.

Sources and method

• Social Security Administration: Popular Baby Names (national data for 2024 and 2025, names given to at least 5 babies of one sex).
• SSA: Change in popularity from 2024 to 2025 for official rank changes.
• Group totals (the -lani family, concentration shares) are our own sums over the same SSA files. Name meanings link to our name pages, where every meaning shows its source.