Penny
Penny reached its high-water mark in 1963 at number 86, and has been recorded 101,003 times in all. In 2025 it ranked 740th. About 84,000 Pennys are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 62.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Penny boys named Penny
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 101,003
- Estimated living today
- 84,000
- Median age today
- 62
- Peak year
- 1963
- Best rank
- 86th
- Rank in 2025
- 740th
- First recorded
- 1882
- Girls / boys
- 100,619 / 384
How old the living Pennys are
born that year still alive today
Of the 101,003 babies given the name since 1882, about 84,000 are alive — 83 in every hundred. Roughly 5,600 of them are children and 32,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1963 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.
Notable Pennys
- Penny Marshall (1943–2018)American actress, director and producer
- Penny Mordaunt (born 1973)British politician
- Penny Hardaway (born 1971)American basketball player and coach
- Penny Johnson Jerald (born 1961)American actress
- Penny Oleksiak (born 2000)Canadian swimmer
- Penny Pritzker (born 1959)American billionaire businesswoman
- Penny Wong (born 1968)Australian politician
- Penny Taylor (born 1981)Australian basketball player
People named Penny with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Penny is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Penny is most concentrated in Vermont (2.7×), Montana (2.0×), Indiana (1.9×), Idaho (1.8×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1963
The most popular girls’ names the year Penny peaked:
Penny elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales girls | Penny | 4,595 | 176th |
| Ireland girls | Penny | 736 | 82nd |
| Scotland girls | Penny | 705 | 111th |
| Sweden girls | Penny | 449 | 82nd |
| Northern Ireland girls | Penny | 331 | 67th |
| France girls | Penny | 75 | 5,673rd |
| Belgium girls | Penny | 10 | 1,436th |
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.
Penny: rank by region
In 2014, Penny was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.
| Region | Spelling | Place | Children |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flanders | Penny | 863 | 5 |
Each of these is the top of a list the statistics office cut off somewhere – Belgium below 5 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.
Penny 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 girls | Penny | 36 | 41 |
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
Penny 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.