How Many People Have My Name? Check Your Name Count

No one can give you an exact count of how many people have your full name, but you can get a close estimate in a few minutes. The US Census Bureau counts surnames and the Social Security Administration counts first names. Put the two together and you get a good guess. The harder part is not the number. It is knowing which records online belong to you and which belong to your namesake.

• Surnames: the Census Bureau counted about 6.3 million different surnames in 2010
• Most common: Smith, with 2,442,977 people
• First names: the Social Security Administration publishes how many babies got each name, by year
• Full name: no agency publishes it, so every count is an estimate
• The real risk: records from a person with your name can end up on your file

How many people have my name?

Nobody publishes a count for full names, so you work it out in two steps. First find your surname in the Census Bureau's 2010 surname table. Then find your first name in the Social Security Administration's baby name data. Multiply the two shares and you have an estimate.

Here is the catch. The Census table does not tell you which John Smith owns which record. It gives you a number, and then you are on your own. That gap is where most of the trouble starts.

1. Look up your surname. The Census table lists every surname that 100 or more people share.
2. Look up your first name. The Social Security Administration data comes from a 100 percent sample of Social Security card applications from 1880 on.
3. Do the maths. Turn each count into a share of the population and multiply.
4. Check your records. This is the step the tables cannot do for you.

How common is my name?

Most names are rarer than you think. Even the most common US surname, Smith, belongs to 2,442,977 people. The Census Bureau recorded surnames for about 295 million people in 2010, so that works out to roughly 0.83 percent, or about 1 person in 120.

Here is how the name calculators work. Say 1 in 100 people shares your surname and 1 in 50 shares your first name. Multiply 0.01 by 0.02 and you get 0.0002. On a population of 300 million, that is about 60,000 people. (These two shares are made up to show the maths.)

The method has one flaw. It treats first names and surnames as if they are unrelated. They are not. Many surnames cluster with certain first names and communities, so the true count can be higher or lower than the estimate.

Even the top surname covers under 1 percent of people. Almost two in three surnames in the Census file were reported only once.

How rare is my name?

If your surname is unusual, you may be the only one with your full name. The 2010 Census recorded about 6.3 million different surnames. Of those, 3.9 million, or 61.9 percent, were reported just once. Some of those are typos and spelling variants from handwritten forms, but many are real one-of-a-kind names.

The Census public table is cut off at 100 people. If your surname is not in it, fewer than 100 people shared it in 2010. Your full name is then very likely rare. The Social Security first-name data is complete for all card applications, so a common first name does not make you hard to tell apart when your surname is rare.

What is the most common last name in America?

Smith is number one. The top 10 surnames in the 2010 Census were these:

Together, the top 10 surnames cover just 4.9 percent of the population. It takes 239 surnames to reach a quarter of everyone. Garcia ranked 6th in 2010, and 12 of the top 50 surnames were at least 90 percent Hispanic.

How common is my last name?

Look it up in the Census Bureau's surname file. It lists every surname with 100 or more people, 162,253 in all, and those names cover 90 percent of everyone with a recorded surname. If your name is in the file, you get an exact 2010 count and a rank.

The friction is that the file is a giant spreadsheet. It gives you a total, but nothing about the people, where they live, or which records they own.

How many people in the world have my name?

There is no world count. Census and Social Security data only cover the United States, and other countries publish their own name data in different formats. A name that is rare in the US can be very common abroad. If your family comes from another country, your surname may have a much larger group of namesakes than the US tables show.

How many people share my name?

More than you might guess, and that is where trouble begins. Computers match records on a name plus a few details, such as age or city. When two people share a name, a record can land on the wrong file.

• Mistaken identity: someone else's address or relatives show up under your name
• Debt collectors: a collector chases the wrong person with your name
• Background checks: a namesake's court record gets read as yours
• Online profiles: a stranger's photos and accounts get mixed with yours

Counting namesakes will not fix any of this. You need to see which records are actually tied to you.

How many people have the same name as me?

In the US, anywhere from a handful to tens of thousands, depending on your names. To find out which records are yours, start with something only you have: your phone number. A phone number belongs to one person, so it cuts through the name overlap.

The full report takes about 2 minutes. It can show the age, past and current addresses, relatives and associates tied to that number. A record that does not match your age or your addresses is probably your namesake's. Deepscanner is the faster path, because the Census and Social Security tables stop at the count.

The two name tables tell you how many. Your own number tells you which records belong to you.

If you find a record that is not yours, ask the company that holds it to correct it. You can also reduce what shows up about you online. Our guide to removing your info from people search sites shows how.

Deepscanner is not a consumer reporting agency under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). Do not use it to make decisions about employment, housing, credit, insurance or tenant screening.