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Girls' name · 160,942 recorded births

Carmen

#389 in the US in 2025

Where Carmen stands

United States register · 1880–2025

#389girls’ names · US 2025

Carmen was the 389th most registered girls' name in the United States in 2025, on 798 births.

peak 1960 · 2,440188019532025

Its moment was 1960, when 2,440 babies were given it.

SOURCE·US Social Security Administration, national baby-name data·Public domain. retrieved from the Internet Archive's 2026 snapshot of ssa.gov (ssa.gov refuses automated requests); files unmodified. SSA lists a name only if it was given to at least 5 babies of that sex that year.·REVIEWED JUL 2026

#389US rank, 2025 (girls)
798US births in 2025
#141its best US rank, in 1968
1960peak year — 2,440 births
142,795US births since 1881
832NZ births since 1958
328E&W births, 2019–2025
Saved in this browser only — no account, nothing sent anywhere.

How Carmen's figures are worked out

  1. Counts come straight from the registrars: the US Social Security Administration (1880–2025) and the New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs (1900–2025). Nothing is scraped from another names site. The SSA files are the agency's own, retrieved from the Internet Archive's 2026 snapshot of ssa.gov (ssa.gov refuses automated requests); files unmodified.
  2. Ranks are computed against every name in that year's file, not just the ones this site publishes pages for — otherwise a rank would flatter every name we happen to list.
  3. The curve is drawn on births per 100,000 of that sex, not raw counts. Raw counts across eras are misleading: far more births were registered in 1957 than in 1890, so a flat count is a falling share.
  4. The reporting floor. Each registrar publishes a name only once it clears a threshold — 5 births of that sex in the US, 10 in New Zealand. Expressed as a share that threshold is itself a curve, and it is drawn on every chart here as the shaded band along the base.
  5. A missing year is a suppressed value, never a zero. Where the registrar published nothing, this site prints “below floor” or “<5”, the curve is broken rather than drawn across the gap, and the missing years are marked on the floor line. Carmen was under the floor in no year of its US record.
share per 100,000 = births ÷ all births of that sex that year × 100,000
reporting floor (share) = 5 ÷ all births of that sex that year × 100,000

Full methodology →

Carmen in the United States

188019001920194019601980200020200.069138
Births per 100,000 of that sex, so eras compare fairly. The shaded band is the 5-birth reporting floor — under it the registrar publishes nothing, so a line that stops has left the record, not fallen to zero. Carmen in the United States, 1880–2025
girlsboys

Between 2016 and 2025 the name has been steady.

SOURCE·US Social Security Administration, national baby-name data·Public domain. retrieved from the Internet Archive's 2026 snapshot of ssa.gov (ssa.gov refuses automated requests); files unmodified. SSA lists a name only if it was given to at least 5 babies of that sex that year.·REVIEWED JUL 2026

Carmen in New Zealand

In New Zealand, Carmen has been registered 832 times since 1958, peaking in 1973 with 93 births. It did not clear the DIA's 10-birth reporting floor in 2025.

1900192019401960198020002020NOT PUBLISHED — BELOW THE 10-BIRTH FLOOR0.0195391
Births per 100,000 of that sex, so eras compare fairly. The shaded band is the 10-birth reporting floor — under it the registrar publishes nothing, so a line that stops has left the record, not fallen to zero. Carmen in New Zealand, 1900–2025

SOURCE·NZ Department of Internal Affairs, births by first name·CC BY 4.0. DIA lists a name only if it was given to at least 10 babies of that sex that year.·REVIEWED JUL 2026

Carmen in England & Wales

In England and Wales, Carmen was registered 328 times between 2019 and 2025, peaking in 2019 with 64 births. It ranked #792 for girls in 2025 on 46 births.

20200.01123
Births per 100,000 of that sex, so eras compare fairly. The shaded band is the 3-birth reporting floor — under it the registrar publishes nothing, so a line that stops has left the record, not fallen to zero. Carmen in England and Wales, 2019–2025
girlsboys

Seven years is a window, not a history. Unlike the American and New Zealand series this one cannot show you a name's arrival or its long decline — ONS publishes the full list only from 2019. England and Wales only: Scotland and Northern Ireland publish separately and are not counted here.

SOURCE·Office for National Statistics, baby names in England and Wales·Open Government Licence v3.0. ONS redacts any name given to 2 or fewer babies of that sex that year, under s40 of the Freedom of Information Act.·REVIEWED JUL 2026

Decade by decade in the US

US rank and births at each decade markSSA · JUL 2026
YearRankBirths
1890#49128
1900#35291
1910#288181
1920#237757
1930#1841,044
1940#211823
1950#1861,460
1960#1672,440
1970#1522,202
1980#1831,461
1990#2181,314
2000#2701,195
2010#3141,017
2020#433708

<5 = the SSA published no figure for that year. It is a suppressed value, not a zero.

Where in the United States

The states that registered Carmen most often since 1881. These are lifetime totals, so they track state population as much as local taste — a name common in Wyoming will never out-count California.

StateBirths
California21,590
New York17,861
Texas17,589
Illinois6,760
Florida4,405
Michigan4,306
Arizona4,138
Ohio4,135
New Jersey3,625
Pennsylvania3,616

Questions about Carmen

How popular is the name Carmen?

Carmen ranked #389 for girls in the United States in 2025, on 798 births registered with the Social Security Administration.

When was Carmen most popular?

Carmen peaked in 1960, when 2,440 babies in the United States were given the name.

Is Carmen rising or falling?

Measured as a share of all girls' births, Carmen has been steady between 2016 and 2025.

Same sex, peaking within a few years of 1960, at a comparable scale. Not a taste engine — this is arithmetic on peak years, which is why it will occasionally hand you something unfashionable that is nonetheless exactly of the period.

SOURCE·US SSA (1880–2025) + NZ DIA (1900–2025) birth registrations·ranks and shares computed from the source files, see method·REVIEWED JUL 2026

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Amit Sharma

Auckland real-estate agent and marketer. Builds free, sourced data tools.