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Girls' name · 115,506 recorded births

Mae

#500 in the US in 2025

Where Mae stands

United States register · 1880–2025

#500girls’ names · US 2025

Mae was the 500th most registered girls' name in the United States in 2025, on 594 births.

peak 1918 · 2,756188019532025

Its moment was 1918, when 2,756 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

#500US rank, 2025 (girls)
594US births in 2025
#52its best US rank, in 1892
1918peak year — 2,756 births
114,835US births since 1880
23NZ births since 2012
648E&W births, 2019–2025
Saved in this browser only — no account, nothing sent anywhere.

How Mae'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. Mae 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 →

Mae in the United States

188019001920194019601980200020200.0259519
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. Mae in the United States, 1880–2025

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

Mae in New Zealand

In New Zealand, Mae has been registered 23 times since 2012, peaking in 2012 with 12 births. It did not clear the DIA's 10-birth reporting floor in 2025.

1900192019401960198020002020NOT PUBLISHED — BELOW THE 10-BIRTH FLOOR0.03672
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. Mae 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

Mae in England & Wales

In England and Wales, Mae was registered 648 times between 2019 and 2025, peaking in 2025 with 108 births. It ranked #391 for girls in 2025 on 108 births. Across those years it has been rising.

20200.02143
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. Mae in England and Wales, 2019–2025

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
1880#71344
1890#58920
1900#541,406
1910#651,453
1920#992,730
1930#1371,650
1940#1851,018
1950#287737
1960#519347
1970#1,026120
1980#1,50279
1990#2,17459
2000#1,402132
2010#979259
2020#572511

<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 Mae most often since 1880. 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
Pennsylvania5,428
Texas4,977
Georgia4,778
New York4,738
North Carolina4,696
Mississippi4,604
Alabama3,792
South Carolina3,746
Kentucky3,084
Illinois3,026

Questions about Mae

How popular is the name Mae?

Mae ranked #500 for girls in the United States in 2025, on 594 births registered with the Social Security Administration.

When was Mae most popular?

Mae peaked in 1918, when 2,756 babies in the United States were given the name.

Is Mae rising or falling?

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

Same sex, peaking within a few years of 1918, 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.