Rafael

Popularity, 1880–2025

girls named Rafael boys named Rafael

By the numbers

Total US births

89,947

Estimated living today

80,000

Median age today

28

Peak year

2006

Best rank

217th

Rank in 2025

218th

First recorded

1880

Girls / boys

568 / 89,379

How old the living Rafaels are

born that year still alive today

Of the 89,947 babies given the name since 1880, about 80,000 are alive — 89 in every hundred. Roughly 25,000 of them are children and 4,200 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1997 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

Compare Spanish Rafael, Portuguese Rafael.

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

Notable Rafaels

• Rafael Menestra (born 1963)President of Ecuador (2007 - 2017) y Prófugo de la Justicia
• Rafael Nadal (born 1986)Spanish tennis player
• Jorge Rafael Videla (1925–2013)Argentine dictator
• Rafael van der Vaart (born 1983)Dutch association football player
• Rafael Trujillo (1891–1961)President of the Dominican Republic
• Rafael Márquez El piojo (born 1979)Mexican association football player
• Rafael Leão (born 1999)Portuguese footballer
• Rafael Pereira da Silva (born 1990)Brazilian footballer

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

Where Rafael is most common

• CA24,123
• TX16,644
• NY12,443
• FL4,790
• IL4,458
• NJ2,946
• AZ2,782
• MA1,578
• PA1,285
• GA1,222

Relative to how many babies each state records, Rafael is most concentrated in California (2.8×), Arizona (2.6×), Texas (2.5×), New Mexico (2.4×).

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

Names of 2006

The most popular boys’ names the year Rafael peaked:

• Jacob
• Michael
• Joshua
• Ethan
• Matthew
• Daniel

All the names of 2006

Rafael 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.

Rafael: 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, Rafael is most concentrated in Geneva, where 0.31% of children were given it – 318 of them.

Rafael: rank by region

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

In 2023, Rafael was among the 10 most common names in 1 region of Italy.

In 2025, Rafael was given 2 times or more in 4 regions of Poland.

In 2025, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Rafael appears in the lists for Province of Walloon Brabant (Rafael, 48th), Province of Hainaut (Rafael, 57th), Province of Flemish Brabant (Rafael, 77th), Brussels-Capital Region (Rafael, 114th), Province of West Flanders (Rafael, 121st), Province of Liège (Rafael, 147th), Province of West Flanders (Rafaël, 178th), Province of Antwerp (Rafael, 204th) and Province of East Flanders (Rafael, 264th).

Each of these is the top of a list the statistics office cut off somewhere – Belgium below 5 children, 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.

Rafael by city

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

Rafael 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 Finland this is mostly a middle name: of the 6,013 who carry it, 970 go by it.

A count of people on a register – Finland on 4 August 2026, the Netherlands on 1 January 2018 – 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 Rafael lives in Spain

Not a count of births but of people: 217,304 men called Rafael were living in Spain on 1 January 2025, of every age, born in any year. Where they live is not spread evenly.

Men: 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

• Rafaela
• Rafe
• Raffaele
• Rafeal
• Raffi
• Rafaella
• Raffaela
• Rafi

Rafael against another name

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

• Rafael vs Rafaela
• Rafael vs Rafe
• Rafael vs Raffaele
• Rafael vs Rafeal
• Rafael vs Raffi
• Rafael vs Rafaella

Compare Rafael with a name of your own