Benjamin
829,312 recorded births · active 1880–2025
Compare Benjamin →Living-age distribution
The median living Benjamin is 29. If you meet a Benjamin, there's about a 70% chance they're between 10 and 48 years old.
Popularity arc
Peak Benjamin: 1981. Down 25% from peak.
Projected: the dashed 10-year forecast (Holt damped-trend exponential smoothing, fit to recent years), with a shaded 95% interval.
Gender balance
Benjamin is almost always given to male babies — 99.7% male.
Rarity
Benjamin ranks #61 out of 105,966 names ever recorded by the SSA.
Geographic fingerprint
Benjamins are 1.3x more common in the West than the national average.
Predictive modeling
Three statistical models, all fit to Benjamin's own SSA history plus the historical behavior of every other name in the dataset.
Peak popularity prediction
Benjamin's modeled peak was #11 in 2016 — its trend isn't projected to beat that.
Projects the trend forward, then converts share into rank using this year's popularity distribution.
This forecasts Benjamin's share of births by fitting a damped-trend model to its last 146 years of data and projecting 10 years forward with a widening uncertainty band. Each projected share is then translated into a rank by comparing it against 2025's actual name-popularity distribution — so the model implicitly assumes the overall shape of that distribution doesn't shift much over the forecast window. Its trend is projected to stay below its historic best over the next 10 years, so the model treats 2016 as its peak. Milestone probabilities come from how much of each year's uncertainty band clears that milestone's rank, combined across years as if they were independent — which slightly overstates the odds for names sitting right at a threshold, since a good year is usually followed by another good year rather than an independent coin flip.Name life-cycle stage
A rule-based classifier over recent growth, momentum, and peak proximity.
Births have shrunk about 4% a year on average over the last 5 years, and the decline is accelerating.
Popularity survival model
Once a name reaches a rank tier, how long does it typically stay there before falling out?
Built from a Kaplan-Meier survival curve: every historical run any name has ever had above this tier, with runs still ongoing today counted as still in progress rather than as an exit.Benjamin has been in the Top 100 tier for 52 years running.
Chance Benjamin is still in Top 100 after:
Median years remaining above Top 100: ~19. Based on 668 historical Top 100 runs across every name in the dataset.