Foster
About 13,408 American babies have been named Foster since 1880, most of them around 2025. In 2025 it ranked 901st. About 7,500 Fosters are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 19.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Foster boys named Foster
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 13,408
- Estimated living today
- 7,500
- Median age today
- 19
- Peak year
- 2025
- Best rank
- 901st
- Rank in 2025
- 901st
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 286 / 13,122
How old the living Fosters are
born that year still alive today
Of the 13,408 babies given the name since 1880, about 7,500 are alive — 56 in every hundred. Roughly 3,600 of them are children and 1,200 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 2006 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
English surname, reduced from Forster; also from the noun foster.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Fosters
- Norman Foster Ramsey (1915–2011)American physicist
- David Foster Wallace (1962–2008)American fiction writer and essayist
- John Foster Dulles (1888–1959)United States Secretary of State
- George Foster Peabody (1852–1938)American banker and philanthropist
- Foster Furcolo (1911–1995)US politician
People named Foster with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Foster is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Foster is most concentrated in Kentucky (3.2×), Alabama (3.1×), Louisiana (3.0×), South Carolina (2.9×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 2025
The most popular boys’ names the year Foster peaked:
Foster elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales boys | Foster | 97 | 2,276th |
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.
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.