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Girls' name · 1,017,753 recorded births

Nancy

#965 in the US in 2025

Where Nancy stands

United States register · 1880–2025

#965girls’ names · US 2025

Nancy was the 965th most registered girls' name in the United States in 2025, on 265 births.

peak 1947 · 32,445188019532025

Its moment was 1947, when 32,445 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

#965US rank, 2025 (girls)
265US births in 2025
#6its best US rank, in 1950
1947peak year — 32,445 births
1,004,448US births since 1880
5,371NZ births since 1901
4,989E&W births, 2019–2025
Saved in this browser only — no account, nothing sent anywhere.

How Nancy'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. Nancy 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 →

Nancy in the United States

188019001920194019601980200020200.09151830
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. Nancy 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

Nancy in New Zealand

In New Zealand, Nancy has been registered 5,371 times since 1901, peaking in 1920 with 170 births. It did not clear the DIA's 10-birth reporting floor in 2025.

1900192019401960198020002020NOT PUBLISHED — BELOW THE 10-BIRTH FLOOR0.06871374
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. Nancy 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

Nancy in England & Wales

In England and Wales, Nancy was registered 4,989 times between 2019 and 2025, peaking in 2019 with 816 births. It ranked #78 for girls in 2025 on 604 births.

20200.0146291
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. Nancy 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#62410
1890#84512
1900#99673
1910#105811
1920#952,982
1930#249,068
1940#719,737
1950#629,617
1960#1521,891
1970#507,063
1980#1102,806
1990#1312,385
2000#2321,378
2010#519574
2020#896295

<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 Nancy 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 York93,790
California81,573
Pennsylvania75,363
Illinois62,654
Ohio57,308
Michigan49,033
Texas43,639
Massachusetts40,055
New Jersey34,997
Indiana27,694

Questions about Nancy

How popular is the name Nancy?

Nancy ranked #965 for girls in the United States in 2025, on 265 births registered with the Social Security Administration.

When was Nancy most popular?

Nancy peaked in 1947, when 32,445 babies in the United States were given the name.

Is Nancy rising or falling?

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

Same sex, peaking within a few years of 1947, 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.