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Girls' name · 1,305,993 recorded births

Margaret

#112 in the US in 2025

Where Margaret stands

United States register · 1880–2025

#112girls’ names · US 2025

Margaret was the 112th most registered girls' name in the United States in 2025, on 2,436 births.

peak 1921 · 28,468188019532025

Its moment was 1921, when 28,468 babies were given it.

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

#112US rank, 2025 (girls)
2,436US births in 2025
#3its best US rank, in 1891
1921peak year — 28,468 births
1,264,774US births since 1880
36,780NZ births since 1900
694E&W births, 2019–2025
Saved in this browser only — no account, nothing sent anywhere.

How Margaret'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. Margaret was under the floor in no year 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 →

Margaret in the United States

188019001920194019601980200020200.011952389
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. Margaret 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

Margaret in New Zealand

In New Zealand, Margaret has been registered 36,780 times since 1900, peaking in 1947 with 841 births. It ranked #197 for girls in 2025 on 20 births.

19001920194019601980200020200.037367471
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. Margaret 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

Margaret in England & Wales

In England and Wales, Margaret was registered 694 times between 2019 and 2025, peaking in 2020 with 124 births. It ranked #413 for girls in 2025 on 98 births.

20200.02346
Births per 100,000 of that sex, so eras compare fairly. The shaded band is the 3-birth reporting floor — under it the registrar publishes nothing, so a line that stops has left the record, not fallen to zero. Margaret in England and Wales, 2019–2025

Seven years is a window, not a history. Unlike the American and New Zealand series this one cannot show you a name's arrival or its long decline — ONS publishes the full list only from 2019. England and Wales only: Scotland and Northern Ireland publish separately and are not counted here.

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
1880#61,578
1890#43,100
1900#45,304
1910#38,226
1920#427,994
1930#518,350
1940#1115,063
1950#1518,110
1960#3611,362
1970#804,704
1980#1052,859
1990#1023,372
2000#1103,122
2010#1821,702
2020#1262,196

<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 Margaret most often since 1880. 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
New York116,752
Pennsylvania115,956
Illinois63,305
Ohio59,084
California52,056
Michigan45,304
Texas44,013
New Jersey42,401
Massachusetts40,326
North Carolina39,604

Questions about Margaret

How popular is the name Margaret?

Margaret ranked #112 for girls in the United States in 2025, on 2,436 births registered with the Social Security Administration.

When was Margaret most popular?

Margaret peaked in 1921, when 28,468 babies in the United States were given the name.

Is Margaret rising or falling?

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

Same sex, peaking within a few years of 1921, 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.