A little birthday joy. A lot less guesswork. U.S. edition ↗
A birthday curiosity, with context

The most common birthdays in historical U.S. birth data

September 12 has the most cumulative births in this 2000–2014 dataset published by FiveThirtyEight and attributed to the Social Security Administration. Explore the rankings and see where your month and day fall.

Historical records, not a current population survey. February 29 occurs fewer times than other dates; switch measures to compare births per occurrence.

Most cumulative births

September 12

191,024

recorded births across 15 occurrences of this date

2000–2014 · U.S. historical data

Where does your birthday land?

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Your date is used only for this lookup.

Dates with more births

All recorded births on each month and day added together. February 29 has fewer occurrences in this period.

Showing 20 of 366 dates, most first.

Birthday rankings for 2000–2014, most births first
OrderBirthdayCumulative birthsOccurrencesRelative amount
1September 12191,02415
2September 19190,43515
3September 20188,12315
4December 19186,68515
5September 10186,66815
6December 20186,59315
7September 18186,38715
8August 8186,32815
9September 26186,32215
10September 17185,79215
11August 15185,39115
12August 29185,07315
13September 9184,66215
14August 22183,83515
15July 11183,41015
16August 1183,25415
17July 7183,24615
18August 28183,20215
19September 13183,13115
20September 25183,07315

What these rankings actually mean.

The source contains daily birth counts for 2000–2014. We group the records by month and day. There are 5,479 daily records and 62,187,024 recorded births in the dataset.

  • Cumulative births: sum of all recorded births for a month and day across the source period. This describes how many births in this dataset have that birthday.
  • Births per date occurrence: cumulative births divided by the number of times that date occurs in the dataset. Each date’s denominator is shown in the table. This compares the average count on days when the date actually existed.
  • February 29: occurs only in leap years. The cumulative ranking reflects its fewer occurrences. The per-occurrence measure divides by its actual occurrences, without inserting zero-birth days into non-leap years.
  • Ordering: the largest values are shown first, with calendar date breaking ties. Lookup ranks use 1 for the most births and give equal values equal ranks. Displayed averages are rounded; sorting uses the unrounded values.

These are historical birth records, not the birthdays of all people alive today. They do not account for later migration or deaths. The counts alone do not establish why a date is more or less common.

Historical U.S. daily birth counts for 2000–2014, aggregated by month and day. This is not a distribution of the current U.S. population, is not a prediction, and does not explain causes. Total ranks favor dates that occurred more often in the period; daily-average ranks adjust for each date’s observed occurrences. Feb. 29 appears only in leap years.

Source and reuse

Contains data from FiveThirtyEight, “US births, 2000–2014 (SSA),” licensed under CC BY 4.0. Dataset documentation ↗ · Original CSV ↗ · CC BY 4.0 ↗

We grouped daily records into month/day totals, calculated averages and ranks, and built this presentation. No daily counts were changed. Source checked 2026-09-17.

Dataset integrity details

SHA-256 of our saved UTF-8 CSV snapshot:

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