Kennedy

At the 2020 census, 171,457 Americans bore the surname Kennedy — 149th out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 1,743.

By the numbers

People: 171,457
Rank: 149th
How common: 1 in 1,743
Per 100,000: 57.4

Where the name comes from

Origin Irish

or Scottish Gaelic Ceannaideach (. Compare Kenneth and Irish eitigh.

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

Who bears the name

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

White, not Hispanic 78.0%
Black, not Hispanic 13.3%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 3.9%
Hispanic or Latino 3.5%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 0.8%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 0.6%

Notable people called Kennedy

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963)president of the United States from 1961 to 1963
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1929–1994)First Lady of the United States from 1961 to 1963
Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968)American politician and lawyer
Ted Kennedy (1932–2009)United States Senator from Massachusetts from 1962 to 2009
George Kennedy (1925–2016)American actor
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (born 1954)26th United States Secretary of Health and Human Services since 2025
Joshua Kennedy (born 1982)Australian association football player
Caroline Kennedy (born 1957)American author and diplomat

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

Surnames like Kennedy

Also a first name

Kennedy has been given to 101,120 American babies as a first name since 1912, peaking in 2015. 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.