Maria

Popularity, 1880–2025

girls named Maria boys named Maria

By the numbers

Total US births

570,389

Estimated living today

466,000

Median age today

45

Peak year

1964

Best rank

41st

Rank in 2025

87th

First recorded

1880

Girls / boys

566,111 / 4,278

How old the living Marias are

born that year still alive today

Of the 570,389 babies given the name since 1880, about 466,000 are alive — 82 in every hundred. Roughly 54,000 of them are children and 84,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1980 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 Hebrew

Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Notable Marias

• Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926)Austrian poet and writer
• Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970)German-born novelist
• Maria Sharapova (born 1987)Russian tennis player
• Maria Montessori (1870–1952)Italian physician and educator
• Maria Theresa of Austria (1717–1780)ruler of the Habsburg Dominions
• Maria Göppert Mayer (1906–1972)German-born American theoretical physicist
• Maria Meneghini Callas (1923–1977)American-Greek operatic soprano
• María Corina Machado (born 1967)Venezuelan politician, activist and Nobel laureate

People named Maria with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).

Where Maria is most common

• TX136,205
• CA106,781
• NY58,810
• IL24,935
• PA20,074
• NJ17,959
• FL17,165
• AZ15,114
• OH13,573
• MI11,999

Relative to how many babies each state records, Maria is most concentrated in Texas (3.2×), New Mexico (2.9×), Arizona (2.2×), California (1.9×).

Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.

Names of 1964

The most popular girls’ names the year Maria peaked:

• Lisa
• Mary
• Susan
• Karen
• Patricia
• Kimberly

All the names of 1964

Maria elsewhere

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.

Maria: births by region

Parts of a country counted above, not extra births. The share is what makes the regions comparable: they differ in size by a factor of three hundred.

By canton, Maria is most concentrated in Valais, where 0.24% of children were given it – 163 of them.

Maria: rank by region

In 2025, Maria was given 5 times or more in 3 regions of Belgium.

In 2024, Maria was among the 10 most common names in 9 regions of Spain, and first in 2 of them. It has come first somewhere in 23 different years.

In 2024, Maria was among the 10 most common names in 1 region of Italy.

In 2025, Maria was given 2 times or more in 16 regions of Poland.

In 2005, with the country taken in 5 parts rather than 21, Maria appears in the lists for Sud (9th).

In 2025, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Maria appears in the lists for Brussels-Capital Region (6th), Province of Flemish Brabant (33rd), Province of Luxembourg (35th), Province of Namur (36th), Province of Antwerp (67th), Province of East Flanders (86th), Province of West Flanders (86th), Province of Hainaut (133rd) and Province of Liège (157th).

Each of these is the top of a list the statistics office cut off somewhere – Belgium below 5 children, Spain after 10 names, Italy after 10 names, Poland below 2 children – and published nothing after. So a region missing here is one where the name fell outside what was published, not one where it went unused. Places are shared where names tie, and the further down a list a place is, the more names can share it.

Maria by city

One city over a few years, so these are much smaller numbers than the national ones above and not comparable with them.

Maria 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.

Among boys in the Netherlands this is mostly a middle name: of the 468,188 who carry it, 606 go by it.

A count of people on a register – the Netherlands on 1 January 2018, 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.

Where Maria lives in Spain

Not a count of births but of people: 543,083 women called Maria were living in Spain on 1 January 2025, of every age, born in any year. Where they live is not spread evenly.

Women: the provinces where it is densest

Listed in 52 of Spain's 52 provinces. The rate is the source's own, not a share worked out here.

Related names

• Mary
• Mark
• Margaret
• Martha
• Marie
• Marilyn
• Martin
• Marjorie
• Marion
• Marvin
• Marcus
• Mario

Maria against another name

Two names on one chart, with the year one overtook the other.

• Maria vs Mariah
• Maria vs Mary
• Maria vs Mark
• Maria vs Margaret
• Maria vs Martha
• Maria vs Marie

Compare Maria with a name of your own