Pooja
Pooja is a girl's name that peaked in 1997, when it was the 1,419th most popular in the United States. It has not appeared in the national data since 2018. About 1,900 Poojas are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 29.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Pooja
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 1,981
- Estimated living today
- 1,900
- Median age today
- 29
- Peak year
- 1997
- Best rank
- 1,419th
- Rank in 2025
- unranked
- First recorded
- 1976
How old the living Poojas are
born that year still alive today
Of the 1,981 babies given the name since 1976, about 1,900 are alive — 98 in every hundred. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1996 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 Hindi
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Poojas
- Pooja Hegde (born 1990)Indian actress
- Pooja Bhatt (born 1972)Indian actress
- Pooja Bedi (born 1970)Indian actress
- Pooja Batra (born 1976)Indian-American actress
- Pooja Dhanda (born 1994)Indian woman freestyle wrestler
- Pooja Banerjee (born 1991)Indian actress
- Pooja Sawant (born 1990)Indian actress
People named Pooja with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Pooja is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Pooja is most concentrated in New Jersey (10.2×), California (2.5×), New York (2.3×), Illinois (1.9×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1997
The most popular girls’ names the year Pooja peaked:
Pooja elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales girls | Pooja | 244 | 689th |
| France girls | Pooja | 40 | 5,492nd |
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.
Pooja 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 | Pooja | 9 | 9 |
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.
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.