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Girls' name · 52,419 recorded births

Kelley

#7,133 in the US in 2025

Where Kelley stands

United States register · 1880–2025

#7,133girls’ names · US 2025

Kelley was the 7,133rd most registered girls' name in the United States in 2025, on 15 births.

peak 1968 · 1,918188019532025

Its moment was 1968, when 1,918 babies were given it. In 19 of the years between, the name fell under the 5-birth floor and the registrar published nothing — those years are the marks along the base of the chart, not gaps in the name's use.

SOURCE·US Social Security Administration, national baby-name data·Public domain. retrieved from the Internet Archive's 2026 snapshot of ssa.gov (ssa.gov refuses automated requests); files unmodified. SSA lists a name only if it was given to at least 5 babies of that sex that year.·REVIEWED JUL 2026

#7,133US rank, 2025 (girls)
15US births in 2025
#168its best US rank, in 1968
1968peak year — 1,918 births
46,099US births since 1919
34NZ births since 1971
Saved in this browser only — no account, nothing sent anywhere.

How Kelley's figures are worked out

  1. Counts come straight from the registrars: the US Social Security Administration (1880–2025) and the New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs (1900–2025). Nothing is scraped from another names site. The SSA files are the agency's own, retrieved from the Internet Archive's 2026 snapshot of ssa.gov (ssa.gov refuses automated requests); files unmodified.
  2. Ranks are computed against every name in that year's file, not just the ones this site publishes pages for — otherwise a rank would flatter every name we happen to list.
  3. The curve is drawn on births per 100,000 of that sex, not raw counts. Raw counts across eras are misleading: far more births were registered in 1957 than in 1890, so a flat count is a falling share.
  4. The reporting floor. Each registrar publishes a name only once it clears a threshold — 5 births of that sex in the US, 10 in New Zealand. Expressed as a share that threshold is itself a curve, and it is drawn on every chart here as the shaded band along the base.
  5. A missing year is a suppressed value, never a zero. Where the registrar published nothing, this site prints “below floor” or “<5”, the curve is broken rather than drawn across the gap, and the missing years are marked on the floor line. Kelley was under the floor in 19 years of its US record.
share per 100,000 = births ÷ all births of that sex that year × 100,000
reporting floor (share) = 5 ÷ all births of that sex that year × 100,000

Full methodology →

Kelley in the United States

188019001920194019601980200020200.058117
Births per 100,000 of that sex, so eras compare fairly. The shaded band is the 5-birth reporting floor — under it the registrar publishes nothing, so a line that stops has left the record, not fallen to zero. Kelley in the United States, 1880–2025
girlsboys

Between 2016 and 2025 the name has been steady.

SOURCE·US Social Security Administration, national baby-name data·Public domain. retrieved from the Internet Archive's 2026 snapshot of ssa.gov (ssa.gov refuses automated requests); files unmodified. SSA lists a name only if it was given to at least 5 babies of that sex that year.·REVIEWED JUL 2026

Kelley in New Zealand

In New Zealand, Kelley has been registered 34 times since 1971, peaking in 1971 with 19 births. It did not clear the DIA's 10-birth reporting floor in 2025.

1900192019401960198020002020NOT PUBLISHED — BELOW THE 10-BIRTH FLOOR0.03773
Births per 100,000 of that sex, so eras compare fairly. The shaded band is the 10-birth reporting floor — under it the registrar publishes nothing, so a line that stops has left the record, not fallen to zero. Kelley in New Zealand, 1900–2025

SOURCE·NZ Department of Internal Affairs, births by first name·CC BY 4.0. DIA lists a name only if it was given to at least 10 babies of that sex that year.·REVIEWED JUL 2026

Kelley in England & Wales

Kelley does not appear in the ONS list for England and Wales. That means it was given to fewer than 3 babies in every year from 2019 to 2025 — not that it is unused there. ONS publishes only those seven years, so a name that had its moment in England before 2019 is invisible here however common it once was.

SOURCE·Office for National Statistics, baby names in England and Wales·Open Government Licence v3.0. ONS redacts any name given to 2 or fewer babies of that sex that year, under s40 of the Freedom of Information Act.·REVIEWED JUL 2026

Decade by decade in the US

US rank and births at each decade markSSA · JUL 2026
YearRankBirths
1920#4,9755
1930below floor<5
1940#4,3495
1950#2,00223
1960#2891,004
1970#2121,497
1980#2361,084
1990#308887
2000#1,021206
2010#3,07554
2020#4,54829

<5 = the SSA published no figure for that year. It is a suppressed value, not a zero.

Where in the United States

The states that registered Kelley most often since 1919. These are lifetime totals, so they track state population as much as local taste — a name common in Wyoming will never out-count California.

StateBirths
California4,695
Texas3,307
Ohio2,804
New York2,155
Michigan2,082
Massachusetts1,931
Pennsylvania1,870
Illinois1,724
Florida1,641
Georgia1,447

Questions about Kelley

How popular is the name Kelley?

Kelley ranked #7,133 for girls in the United States in 2025, on 15 births registered with the Social Security Administration.

When was Kelley most popular?

Kelley peaked in 1968, when 1,918 babies in the United States were given the name.

Is Kelley rising or falling?

Measured as a share of all girls' births, Kelley has been steady between 2016 and 2025.

Same sex, peaking within a few years of 1968, at a comparable scale. Not a taste engine — this is arithmetic on peak years, which is why it will occasionally hand you something unfashionable that is nonetheless exactly of the period.

SOURCE·US SSA (1880–2025) + NZ DIA (1900–2025) birth registrations·ranks and shares computed from the source files, see method·REVIEWED JUL 2026

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Amit Sharma

Auckland real-estate agent and marketer. Builds free, sourced data tools.