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Mikaela vs Mikayla

American parents have registered 56,724 Mikaylas since 1880, against 20,719 Mikaelas. Mikayla is still ahead, with 364 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Mikaela against Mikayla, 1880 to 2025 0 1k 2k 3k 4k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Mikaela Mikayla

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, Mikayla for 37 years and Mikaela for 20 years. The lead changed hands once.

Side by side

  Mikaela Mikayla
Total US births 20,71956,724
Most in one year 1,0713,858
Babies in 2025 241364
Estimated living today 20,00056,000
Median age today 2222
Peak year 19971998
Best rank 273rd girls82nd girls
Rank in 2025 1,034th746th
First recorded 19661970
Girls / boys 20,719 / 056,713 / 11

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 Mikaela Mikayla
England and Wales 565992
New Zealand 481,492
France 45015
Ireland 155195
Scotland 65120
Poland 374
Northern Ireland 35

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: Mikaela and Mikayla.