McKinley

At the 2020 census, 23,014 Americans bore the surname McKinley — 1,513th out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 13,000.

By the numbers

People: 23,014
Rank: 1,513th
How common: 1 in 13,000
Per 100,000: 7.7

Where the name comes from

Origin Scottish Gaelic

Anglicized from Scottish Gaelic Mac Fhionnlaoich, "son of Fionnlaoch (=Fair Warrior)". The dollar-bill sense is from the portrait of William McKinley featured on it.

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

Who bears the name

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

White, not Hispanic 71.5%
Black, not Hispanic 19.2%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 4.0%
Hispanic or Latino 3.7%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 0.9%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 0.7%

Notable people called McKinley

William McKinley (1843–1901)president of the United States from 1897 to 1901
Ida Saxton McKinley (1847–1907)First Lady of the United States from 1897 to 1901
Chuck McKinley (1941–1986)American tennis player
David McKinley (1947–2026)American politician
John McKinley (1780–1852)Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
William B. McKinley (1856–1926)United States Senator from Illinois
Ray McKinley (1910–1995)American jazz drummer, singer, and bandleader
Robin McKinley (born 1952)American fantasy writer

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

Surnames like McKinley

Also a first name

McKinley has been given to 22,884 American babies as a first name since 1890, peaking in 2014. 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.