How the decade list is made
For every year from 1980 to 1989, we take the official count for each name in the U.S. Social Security Administration’s yearly top 1,000 and add the years together. A year in which a name was outside that year’s top 1,000 adds nothing, because the yearly files we use stop at rank 1,000; this only affects names near the bottom of the list. Spellings count separately (Sofia and Sophia are two names), and the rank in 2024 shows “1,000+” when a name has left the top 1,000.
Source: ssa.gov. Retrieved 2026-10-18. U.S. government data, no SSA endorsement implied.