Humanverse

Kaya vs Kayleigh

American parents have registered 34,568 Kayleighs since 1880, against 10,976 Kayas. Kayleigh is still ahead, with 340 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Kaya against Kayleigh, 1880 to 2025 0 400 800 1.2k 1.6k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Kaya Kayleigh

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

Of the 57 years in which either name was published, Kayleigh for 41 years and Kaya for 16 years. The lead changed hands once.

Side by side

  Kaya Kayleigh
Total US births 10,97634,568
Most in one year 5611,450
Babies in 2025 221340
Estimated living today 11,00034,000
Median age today 1718
Peak year 20042009
Best rank 541st girls227th girls
Rank in 2025 1,132nd799th
First recorded 19681984
Girls / boys 10,314 / 66234,561 / 7

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.

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 Kaya Kayleigh
England and Wales 2,77110,695
Scotland 1433,936
Ireland 1842,304
Poland 6572
France 42515
Belgium 124301
Northern Ireland 14350

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: Kaya and Kayleigh.