Humanverse

Kaiah vs Kaitlyn

American parents have registered 166,921 Kaitlyns since 1880, against 991 Kaiahs. Kaitlyn is still ahead, with 340 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Kaiah against Kaitlyn, 1880 to 2025 0 2.5k 5k 7.5k 10k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Kaiah Kaitlyn

Each line is every baby given the name that year, girls and boys added together — the only count that means the same thing for both names. A line breaks where the name fell below five babies in a year — the point at which the SSA stops publishing it — rather than being drawn through a figure nobody published. A single published year in a gap shows as a dot.

Who was ahead

Kaitlyn has been the commoner name in every year either was published, 1971 to 2025. The lead has never changed hands.

The closest they came was 2025, when Kaiah had 52 and Kaitlyn had 340.

Side by side

  Kaiah Kaitlyn
Total US births 991166,921
Most in one year 688,771
Babies in 2025 52340
Estimated living today 980165,000
Median age today 825
Peak year 20212000
Best rank 2,558th girls30th girls
Rank in 2025 3,100th799th
First recorded 19971971
Girls / boys 991 / 0166,689 / 232

A rank is a position within one sex’s list for one year, so the two rank rows are not subtracted from one another and the winning column is not marked on them. The living figure is a life-table estimate, not a count.

Which name is older

Half of the Kaitlyns alive today are over 25; half the Kaiahs are over 8. That is 17 years between them: two names in use at the same time, worn by two different generations.

Where each one is strongest

How much commoner the name is in that state than it is nationally, from births recorded since 1910.

Both names abroad

Countries whose statistics office publishes both names, so the comparison can be made somewhere other than the United States.

Country Kaiah Kaitlyn
England and Wales 485,160
Ireland 4488

Every spelling a country files separately is added together, over whatever years that country publishes — which is not the same range in any two of them, so read the columns against each other and not the rows.

Compare something else

Related comparisons

Social Security Administration birth records, 1880–2025, public domain. Full histories: Kaiah and Kaitlyn.