Sterling
About 41,197 American babies have been named Sterling since 1880, most of them around 2025. In 2025 it ranked 345th. About 31,000 Sterlings are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 25.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Sterling boys named Sterling
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 41,197
- Estimated living today
- 31,000
- Median age today
- 25
- Peak year
- 2025
- Best rank
- 345th
- Rank in 2025
- 345th
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 3,723 / 37,474
How old the living Sterlings are
born that year still alive today
Of the 41,197 babies given the name since 1880, about 31,000 are alive — 76 in every hundred. Roughly 13,000 of them are children and 3,300 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
Origin a surname
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Sterlings
- Sterling Hayden (1916–1986)American actor
- Sterling Knight (born 1989)American actor, singer, songwriter, director, comedian and musician
- Sterling K. Brown (born 1976)American actor
- Sterling Morrison (1942–1995)American musician
- Sterling Holloway (1905–1992)American actor
- Sterling Price (1809–1867)American politician and Confederate States Army general in the Civil War
- Sterling Beaumon (born 1995)American actor
- Sterling Jerins (born 2004)American actress
People named Sterling with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Sterling is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Sterling is most concentrated in Utah (4.2×), Louisiana (2.2×), Virginia (2.0×), Alaska (1.9×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 2025
The most popular boys’ names the year Sterling peaked:
Sterling elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales boys | Sterling | 285 | 1,104th |
| France boys | Sterling | 30 | 4,581st |
| England and Wales girls | Sterling | 3 | 5,581st |
| Scotland boys | Sterling | 3 | 762nd |
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.
Sterling 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 | Sterling | 5 | 8 |
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
Sterling 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.