Bret
About 30,051 American babies have been named Bret since 1926, most of them around 1959. In 2025 it ranked 4,857th. About 26,000 Brets are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 50.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Bret boys named Bret
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 30,051
- Estimated living today
- 26,000
- Median age today
- 50
- Peak year
- 1959
- Best rank
- 170th
- Rank in 2025
- 4,857th
- First recorded
- 1926
- Girls / boys
- 232 / 29,819
How old the living Brets are
born that year still alive today
Of the 30,051 babies given the name since 1926, about 26,000 are alive — 88 in every hundred. Roughly 780 of them are children and 3,900 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1975 and half after.
An estimate, not a count. SSA births aged forward through SSA cohort life tables, which know nothing about who left the country or arrived in it — so for a name that mostly came to America rather than being born in it, this is a floor rather than a figure. Where you fall among living Americans.
Where the name comes from
Origin a surname
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Brets
- Bret Harte (1836–1902)American writer and poet
- Bret Easton Ellis (born 1964)American novelist, screenwriter
- Bret Hart (born 1957)Canadian-American professional wrestler, writer and actor
- Bret Michaels (born 1963)American rock musician
- Bret Iwan (born 1982)American voice actor
- Bret Harrison (born 1982)American actor
- Bret McKenzie (born 1976)New Zealand actor and musician
- Bret Baier (born 1970)American journalist, host of Special Report with Bret Baier on Fox News Channel
People named Bret with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Bret is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Bret is most concentrated in Utah (4.4×), Idaho (3.0×), Montana (2.8×), Iowa (2.7×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1959
The most popular boys’ names the year Bret peaked:
Bret elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales boys | Bret | 139 | 887th |
| Scotland boys | Bret | 6 | 327th |
Counts come from each country's own records and are not comparable with the US figures above, which cover different years and a different definition of a recorded name. Where a country writes the name several ways, the spellings are added together and the most common is shown. A row marked name registrations is counting something else: Portugal ranks each of a child's two given names separately, so a girl registered Maria Leonor is in both the Maria row and the Leonor row, and that figure is not a number of children.
Bret among the living
How many people each country's register counts under the name, rather than how many were given it in any one year. Each register was read on one date, and they are not the same date.
| Country | Spelling | First forename | Any forename |
|---|---|---|---|
| Finland boys | Bret | — | 5 |
A count of people on a register – Finland on 4 August 2026 – and not of births, so it cannot be compared with the figures above. Names with very few bearers are withheld, and a dash in the first-forename column means the register would not say rather than that nobody goes by it.
Related names
Bret against another name
Two names on one chart, with the year one overtook the other.
Try it on yourself
Source: US Social Security Administration, national and state baby-name files, 1880–2025. Counts include only births registered with the SSA, and names with fewer than five births in a year are not published. The living estimate applies SSA cohort life tables to those births; it counts people born in the United States, so it misses anyone who arrived later and anyone who has left.