Pierce

132,277 people in the United States were counted with the surname Pierce in the 2020 census, making it the 213th most common in the country. That is about one person in 2,260.

By the numbers

People: 132,277
Rank: 213th
How common: 1 in 2,260
Per 100,000: 44.3

Where the name comes from

Origin a patronymic

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

Who bears the name

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

White, not Hispanic 77.8%
Black, not Hispanic 12.5%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 4.5%
Hispanic or Latino 3.6%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 1.0%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 0.7%

Notable people called Pierce

Franklin Pierce (1804–1869)president of the United States from 1853 to 1857
Mary Pierce (born 1975)French tennis player
Paul Pierce (born 1977)American basketball player
Jane Pierce (1806–1863)First Lady of the United States from 1853 to 1857
David Hyde Pierce (born 1959)American actor and director
Wendell Pierce (born 1963)American actor and businessman
William Luther Pierce (1933–2002)American neo-Nazi
John R. Pierce (1910–2002)American electrical engineer, acoustics expert, and author

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

Surnames like Pierce

Also a first name

Pierce has been given to 20,634 American babies as a first name since 1880, 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.