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Millennial Names Are Getting Rare Again: Jessica, Ashley, Tyler

Jessica topped the charts with 55,992 babies in 1987. In 2025 it had 424. The real numbers behind the names of a generation, and why they're quietly turning rare.

If you were born between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, there’s a good chance you shared your name with at least two other kids in your class. Maybe you were “Jessica W.” all through elementary school. Maybe there were so many Ashleys on your soccer team that everybody went by last names.

Here’s the twist: those exact names are now some of the rarest choices a new parent can make. Not rare like an invented spelling. Rare like a name everyone can spell, everyone can say, and almost no baby born this year has.

We pulled every name that peaked between 1984 and 1996 inside the top 30, then compared its peak year to 2025. Forty-four names qualified. Every number below is a count of real American babies.

The headline: Jessica went from 55,992 to 424

Jessica was the #1 girl name in America in 1987, given to 55,992 babies that year. It held #1 in 1990 too, with 46,486.

Then it started a long, steady slide: 15,711 babies in 2000, 3,200 in 2010, 780 in 2020. In 2025, 424 babies were named Jessica. It ranks #665.

That’s a 99.2% decline from its peak. To put it another way: for every 132 Jessicas born in 1987, one was born in 2025. A Jessica born this year will very likely be the only one in her grade, and possibly her whole school.

The millennial girls’ names, then and now

The pattern is the same across the whole generation. These were all top-20 names at their peak:

Courtney is the most extreme case. It was the #17 girl name in 1990, with 15,380 babies. In 2025, just 78 baby girls got it, a 99.5% drop. It’s now rarer than most names you’d describe as “unusual.”

The millennial boys: a gentler slope

The boys’ names fell too, but less steeply. Boys’ names have always turned over more slowly than girls’, and the classic ones never fully leave.

Christopher is still a top-100 name, at #68. But 60,021 babies in 1984 versus 4,748 in 2025 means it’s about one-thirteenth as common as it was. Kyle took the biggest hit among the boys: 22,710 at its 1990 peak, 594 in 2025.

Why this happens to every generation

None of this means these names did anything wrong. It’s the normal life cycle of a name, and it runs on a predictable clock.

A name becomes everywhere. The kids who have it grow up. When those kids become parents, their own name feels too familiar to give to a baby, like naming your daughter after your coworker. So the name rests.

Then, roughly a century after its peak, it starts to sound fresh again. That’s the pattern behind the names that are coming back right now. Hazel, Theodore and Florence were all big around the turn of the 1900s, went quiet for decades, and are climbing again. Theodore is now #4. Nobody’s grandmother is named Jessica yet. Give it a few decades.

One name has stopped falling

Here’s a small surprise. Ashley dropped from 54,856 babies in 1987 to 1,808 in 2020. But in 2025 it had 1,829, slightly more than five years earlier.

That’s not a comeback yet. It’s a floor. And Ashley is still more common than most of its classmates on the list. But it’s the first sign that a millennial name has found its level.

What this means if you’re choosing a name

If you love one of these names, the data is on your side in a way it never was for your parents:

• It’s recognizable without being common. Everyone can spell Megan. Very few babies have it. In 2025, there were 301 baby Megans in the whole country.
• It won’t feel dated to your kid’s classmates. To a child born in 2025, “Brittany” doesn’t sound like 1989. It sounds like a name they’ve never heard on the playground.
• It can be a tribute. Naming a baby after a millennial sister, cousin or best friend means picking a name that’s now genuinely distinctive.

And if you were given one of these names, it’s a nice thing to know: the name you shared with three classmates is about to become one of a kind.

Every count on this page is a number of real American babies, taken from the official national birth record that runs back to 1880.

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