The Baby Boom, in One Table

Nov 6, 2026 Abigail Adams, Editorial writer

Every chart on this site sits on top of one foundational fact: how many babies there were. Add up every birth in our records — 116 years of American birth certificates — and you get 330,785,903 babies. Here is where they landed, decade by decade:

Decade	Recorded births	Share of all records
1910s	13,592,162	4.1%
1920s	21,374,697	6.5%
1930s	19,781,280	6.0%
1940s	27,774,170	8.4%
1950s	37,542,457	11.3%
1960s	35,404,091	10.7%
1970s	29,236,022	8.8%
1980s	32,345,932	9.8%
1990s	33,307,336	10.1%
2000s	33,035,104	10.0%
2010s	30,611,690	9.3%
2020–2025	16,780,962	5.1% (six years only)

One decade in nine babies. The 1950s didn't just have the most births of any decade in our records — they out-delivered the 1930s by nearly 18 million babies, and produced almost three times the recorded births of the 1910s.

The single biggest year: 1957

Zoom in from decades to years and the crest is one specific year: 1957, with 4,002,032 recorded births — the only year in the dataset to cross four million. The five biggest years in American records are all bunched at the summit: 1957, 1959, 1960, 1958 and 1961, each above 3.9 million.

That's the Boom at its peak — and it's why the names of the late 1950s (the Lindas giving way to the Lisas and Karens) carry such enormous lifetime totals in our data. A name didn't need to be #1 for long in that era to rack up historic numbers; it just needed to be popular then, when the river was at its widest.

Two honest caveats before you quote this table

The left edge is paperwork, not babies. The 1910s figure (13.6 million) badly undercounts the decade — national birth registration was still being built out, and not every state reported from 1910. You can watch the net widen inside the data itself: 516,300 recorded births in 1910, 1,690,037 by 1915, 2,101,193 by 1920. Babies didn't quadruple in a decade; reporting did. Treat any "growth" before about 1920 as the paperwork catching up.

The right edge is a partial decade. The 2020s row covers six years (2020–2025), not ten. Even adjusting for that, the recent pace is slower than the 2010s: about 2.80 million recorded births a year so far this decade against 3.06 million a year in the 2010s — and the two lightest years since 1976 are both in this decade: 2023 (2,760,671) and 2025 (2,769,754). America's naming pool is shrinking, which is one reason modern #1 names post smaller totals than their grandparents' did.

Why this table explains everything else

Hold this table in mind and half the puzzles in our data solve themselves. Why does Linda (99,685 babies in 1947) out-total every modern name's best year? Because she peaked exactly as the river flooded. Why can a Wyoming state title be won with 20 babies while California's takes 1,796? Because the births were never evenly spread, in place any more than in time.

Popularity is always a share of a river — and the river has a size. This is it.

For the decade-by-decade view of what all those babies were named, start at baby names by decade.