Gavin
About 189,665 American babies have been named Gavin since 1913, most of them around 2007. In 2025 it ranked 303rd. About 186,000 Gavins are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 17.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Gavin boys named Gavin
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 189,665
- Estimated living today
- 186,000
- Median age today
- 17
- Peak year
- 2007
- Best rank
- 32nd
- Rank in 2025
- 303rd
- First recorded
- 1913
- Girls / boys
- 395 / 189,270
How old the living Gavins are
born that year still alive today
Of the 189,665 babies given the name since 1913, about 186,000 are alive — 98 in every hundred. Roughly 95,000 of them are children and 520 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 2008 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 Celtic languages
Medieval variant of Gawain, the name of an Arthurian knight, first recorded as. The form Gavin survived in Scotland and spread to other English-speaking countries in the 1960s.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Gavins
- Gavin Newsom (born 1967)40th governor of California since 2019
- Gavin McInnes (born 1970)Canadian far-right commentator
- Gavin Hood (born 1963)South African filmmaker
- Gavin Williamson (born 1976)British Conservative party politician
- Gavin MacLeod (1931–2021)American actor
- Gavin Rossdale (born 1965)British musician
- Gavin Harrison (born 1963)British drummer
- Gavin McCann (born 1978)English footballer
People named Gavin with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Gavin is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Gavin is most concentrated in Nevada (2.3×), Utah (2.1×), Alaska (2.0×), New Hampshire (1.7×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 2007
The most popular boys’ names the year Gavin peaked:
Gavin elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ireland boys | Gavin | 7,148 | 33rd |
| Scotland boys | Gavin | 5,432 | 31st |
| New Zealand boys | Gavin | 3,197 | 43rd |
| England and Wales boys | Gavin | 1,455 | 185th |
| Northern Ireland boys | Gavin | 274 | 66th |
| France boys | Gavin | 260 | 1,097th |
| Belgium boys | Gavin | 8 | 834th |
| Poland boys | Gavin | 6 birth registrations | 511th |
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.
Gavin 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 | Gavin | 17 | 26 |
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
Gavin 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.