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43 Boy Names at Their All-Time High Right Now

Forty-three boy names hit their highest count on record in 2025. Here they are, ranked — plus which ones the forecast says climb fastest by 2030.

Forty-three boy names finished 2025 at the highest birth count they have ever recorded. Not their best year in a decade — their best year in the 146 years of Social Security Administration data that begins in 1880.

That’s the past tense, though, and it’s the less interesting half. When a name is already at a record, the question worth asking is whether it has room left.

So here’s the forward-looking half first, because it’s where these 43 names stop looking alike. Our five-year projections give each of them a 2030 estimate, and the spread is enormous — from a name expected to more than double to one that’s essentially finished moving.

Which of these climbs fastest

And the other end of the same list — names at a genuine all-time high whose projections say they’ve arrived rather than that they’re still arriving:

Worth saying plainly: these are projections, not promises. Our own backtest — train on data through 2020, predict the next five years, compare against what actually happened — lands at about 17% average error for top-100 names and 33% for names in the 500–1000 range. That’s good enough to tell a steep climb from a plateau. It is not good enough to bet on a specific number in 2030, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

The steep ones

Eithan is the outlier of the whole group, and it isn’t close. In 2015 it was given to 100 boys and ranked #1,599. In 2025 it was given to 3,636 and ranked #97. That’s 36 times as many babies in ten years, and it crossed into the top 100 for the first time last year.

Saint is the other vertical line: 40 boys in 2015, 1,286 in 2025 — 32× — moving from #2,919 to #267. It’s the kind of name that didn’t really exist as a name a decade ago and now sits comfortably inside the top 300.

Then there’s a cluster of what you might call the frontier-surname group, all doing the same thing at the same time:

• Callahan — 83 to 1,566 in ten years (19×), now #227.
• Baker — 87 to 1,640 (19×), now #217.
• Colter — 142 to 2,354 (17×), now #157.
• Stetson — 306 to 2,662 (8.7×), now #136.
• Shepherd — 174 to 1,408 (8.1×), now #246.
• Callum — 369 to 2,995 (8.1×), now #118.

Five of those six are occupational or Western surnames. If you’ve had the feeling that every third boy born in the last two years is named after a job or a rodeo, the data is with you.

The big ones that are still going up

The names above are dramatic because they started from nearly nothing. The more surprising entries are the ones that were already everywhere and went up anyway.

Theodore is the headline: 13,355 boys in 2025, ranked #4, and it has never been higher. A name at #4 has essentially nowhere left to climb, and it climbed. Ten years ago it was at 4,155 — it has more than tripled while sitting near the top of the chart, which is much harder than tripling from obscurity.

Elias (#13, 8,837), Hudson (#17, 8,583), and Santiago (#26, 7,554) are all doing the same thing on a slightly smaller scale. Thiago at #50 is the fastest riser of the top-50 group — 1,032 boys in 2015 to 5,835 now, a 5.7× decade — and its projected growth through 2030 (+61%) is the steepest of any name in that group as well.

None of this makes them worse choices. A name being popular is not a mark against it; it usually means a lot of people independently decided it sounds good, which is not the worst signal in the world. The reason to know the number is so you’re choosing with your eyes open — if you love Theodore and you’d also like your son to be the only one in his class, those two things are now in tension, and it’s better to find that out here than at preschool.

The plateau group

At the other end, Dallas, Silas, Roman, Graham, and Cohen are all at all-time highs with projected five-year growth under 11%. These are names that have finished their climb and settled — still rising, technically, but the steep part is behind them.

For a lot of people that’s the ideal spot on the curve, and it’s worth naming why: a name here is fully established, everyone can spell it, and it isn’t going to feel dated in eight years the way a name caught mid-spike sometimes does. “Arrived” is a feature.

The full 43

Every name below hit its highest-ever count in 2025, after climbing without a single down year since 2022:

Theodore (#4) · Elias (#13) · Hudson (#17) · Santiago (#26) · Bennett (#40) · Roman (#42) · Thiago (#50) · Weston (#55) · Rowan (#59) · Beau (#60) · Brooks (#64) · Silas (#71) · Atlas (#75) · August (#81) · Adriel (#84) · Luka (#85) · Emiliano (#94) · Eithan (#97) · Callum (#118) · Graham (#120) · Stetson (#136) · Elian (#147) · Emilio (#154) · Colter (#157) · Beckham (#168) · Callan (#190) · Jaziel (#198) · Rory (#199) · Baker (#217) · Cohen (#225) · Callahan (#227) · Dallas (#238) · Muhammad (#239) · Ellis (#243) · Shepherd (#246) · Bowen (#266) · Saint (#267) · Koa (#269) · Bodie (#275) · Shiloh (#278) · Ares (#290) · Kohen (#296) · Sonny (#298)

A record year is a snapshot, not a verdict. What it tells you is that a name is in motion — and for most of the 43 above, the projections say it hasn’t stopped yet.

Source: U.S. Social Security Administration data.

Source: U.S. Social Security Administration data, 1880–2025.