Robert

Popularity, 1880–2025

girls named Robert boys named Robert

By the numbers

Total US births

4,869,849

Estimated living today

2.6 million

Median age today

60

Peak year

1947

Best rank

2nd

Rank in 2025

92nd

First recorded

1880

Girls / boys

20,119 / 4,849,730

How old the living Roberts are

born that year still alive today

Of the 4,869,849 babies given the name since 1880, about 2.6 million are alive — 53 in every hundred. Roughly 103,000 of them are children and 1.1 million are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1965 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 Germanic languages

From Anglo-Norman Robert, from the Old Frankish cognate of Old High German Hrodperht (normalised form: Ruodberht), from Proto-West Germanic *Hrōþiberht, from Proto-Germanic *Hrōþiberhtaz.

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

Notable Roberts

• Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)Scottish novelist and poet
• Robert Mugabe (1924–2019)2nd President of Zimbabwe from 1987 to 2017
• Robert De Niro (born 1943)American actor
• Robert Schumann (1810–1856)German composer, pianist and critic
• J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967)American theoretical physicist
• Robert Frost (1874–1963)American poet
• Robert Koch (1843–1910)German physician, bacteriologist
• Robert Burns (1759–1796)Scottish poet and lyricist

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

Where Robert is most common

• NY442,620
• CA354,685
• PA354,535
• OH280,393
• IL278,786
• TX225,989
• MI216,921
• MA173,231
• NJ172,874
• IN129,477

Relative to how many babies each state records, Robert is most concentrated in Rhode Island (1.6×), Massachusetts (1.5×), Vermont (1.4×), the District of Columbia (1.4×).

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

Names of 1947

The most popular boys’ names the year Robert peaked:

• James
• Robert
• John
• William
• Richard
• David

All the names of 1947

Robert 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.

Robert: 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, Robert is most concentrated in Zurich, where 0.04% of children were given it – 146 of them.

Robert: rank by region

In 2025, Robert was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.

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

In 2025, Robert was given 2 times or more in 15 regions of Poland.

In 2024, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Robert appears in the lists for Province of West Flanders (193rd) and Brussels-Capital Region (257th).

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.

Robert by city

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

Robert 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.

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 Robert lives in Spain

Not a count of births but of people: 7,217 men called Robert 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 48 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 4 it is either held by fewer than 5 people – the point below which the source withholds a name – or it fell past the 5,000 names the source will print for one province. Neither means nobody there is called it. The rate is the source's own, not a share worked out here.

Related names

• Robin
• Roberta
• Roberto
• Robyn
• Robbie
• Robby
• Robbin
• Rob
• Robb
• Robinson
• Roby
• Robbi

Robert against another name

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

• Robert vs Robin
• Robert vs Roberta
• Robert vs Roberto
• Robert vs Robyn
• Robert vs Robbie
• Robert vs Robby

Compare Robert with a name of your own