Humanverse

Lance vs Landon

American parents have registered 187,785 Landons since 1880, against 106,184 Lances. Landon is still ahead, with 2,868 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Lance against Landon, 1880 to 2025 0 3k 6k 9k 12k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Lance Landon

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 138 years in which either name was published, Landon for 69 years and Lance for 69 years. The lead changed hands 18 times.

11 shorter spells of a year or two are folded into the spans above rather than listed separately.

Side by side

  Lance Landon
Total US births 106,184187,785
Most in one year 4,17310,510
Babies in 2025 2792,868
Estimated living today 92,000184,000
Median age today 4514
Peak year 19702010
Best rank 76th boys33rd boys
Rank in 2025 862nd127th
First recorded 18991882
Girls / boys 345 / 105,8391,182 / 186,603

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 Lances alive today are over 45; half the Landons are over 14. That is 31 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 Lance Landon
England and Wales 648530
France 5075
Scotland 2310

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: Lance and Landon.