Shah
At the 2020 census, 76,855 Americans bore the surname Shah — 413th out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 3,889.
By the numbers
- People
- 76,855
- Rank
- 413th
- How common
- 1 in 3,889
- Per 100,000
- 25.7
Where the name comes from
Borrowed from Persian شاه (“shah, king”), a Persian surname which is widespread in Iran and in the subcontinent.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Who bears the name
How people with the surname Shah described their own race and Hispanic origin at the 2020 census:
Notable people called Shah
- Reza Shah (1878–1944)Shah of Iran from 1925 to 1941 and founder of the Pahlavi Dynasty
- Nader Shah (1698–1747)Shah of Iran (r. 1736–47) and founder of the Afsharid dynasty
- Naseeruddin Shah (born 1950)Indian actor and director
- Jahandar Shah (1661–1713)the eighth Mughal Emperor from 1712 to 1713
- Amit Shah (born 1964)Indian politician and 32nd Union Minister of Home Affairs
- Balendra Shah (born 1990)Nepalese rapper and politician; Prime Minister of Nepal since 2026
- Prithvi Narayan Shah (1723–1775)King of Nepal
- Ahmad Shah Bahadur (1725–1775)13th Mughal Emperor from 1748 to 1754
People named Shah with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Surnames like Shah
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.