Hays

At the 2020 census, 33,013 Americans bore the surname Hays — 1,046th out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 9,054.

By the numbers

People: 33,013
Rank: 1,046th
How common: 1 in 9,054
Per 100,000: 11.0

Where the name comes from

Spelling variant of Hayes, which has multiple origins.

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

Who bears the name

How people with the surname Hays described their own race and Hispanic origin at the 2020 census:

White, not Hispanic 88.1%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 4.1%
Hispanic or Latino 3.4%
Black, not Hispanic 3.2%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 0.7%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 0.6%

Notable people called Hays

Robert Hays (born 1947)American actor
William Harrison Hays (1879–1954)American politician
Todd Hays (born 1969)American bobsledder
Mary Hays (1759–1843)British writer
Matilda Hays (1820–1897)British journalist, translator, editor
Kathryn Hays (1933–2022)American actress
Charles Melville Hays (1856–1912)American businessman

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

Surnames like Hays

Also a first name

Hays has been given to 745 American babies as a first name since 1880, peaking in 2024. See it as a given name.

Try it on yourself

Source: US Census Bureau, Frequently Occurring Surnames, 2020. The Census describes the file as the surnames borne by 100 or more people; rarer names are not published. The line is not quite exact, and 617 published names come in under it, the smallest at 92 people. Race and Hispanic origin are self-reported. Rates are worked out against the 298.9 million people the file's own figures are calculated on, which is fewer than the census counted in all: the difference is everyone whose surname was too rare to publish.