Raj
The boy's name Raj has been in the national records since 1950, with 2,176 births to its name. In 2025 it ranked 4,539th. About 2,100 Rajs are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 25.
Popularity, 1880–2025
boys named Raj
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 2,176
- Estimated living today
- 2,100
- Median age today
- 25
- Peak year
- 2003
- Best rank
- 1,478th
- Rank in 2025
- 4,539th
- First recorded
- 1950
How old the living Rajs are
born that year still alive today
Of the 2,176 babies given the name since 1950, about 2,100 are alive — 96 in every hundred. Roughly 590 of them are children and 3 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 2000 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
Proprialisation of raj (“(India) reign, rule”), borrowed from inc-hnd राज / راج (“reign, rule; empire, kingdom; country, state; royalty”), from Sanskrit राज्य (“empire, kingdom, realm; kingship, royalty, sovereignty; country”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *h₃reǵ- (“to right or straighten oneself; to govern, rule; just; right”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Rajs
- Raj Kapoor (1924–1988)Indian actor and filmmaker
- Mulk Raj Anand (1905–2004)Indian English writer
- Raj Reddy (born 1937)Indian-American computer scientist
- Raj Babbar (born 1952)Indian actor and politician
- Raj Patel (born 1972)British academic
- Raj Chandra Bose (1901–1987)Indian mathematician
- Raj Bhavsar (born 1980)gymnast
- Raj Chetty (born 1979)American economist
People named Raj with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Raj is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Raj is most concentrated in New Jersey (8.9×), California (3.3×), Illinois (2.0×), New York (1.8×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 2003
The most popular boys’ names the year Raj peaked:
Raj elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales boys | Raj | 229 | 633rd |
| France boys | Raj | 50 | 5,343rd |
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.
Raj 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 | Raj | 8 | 48 |
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
Raj 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.