How common is your last name?

What the surname file actually is

Every ten years the Census Bureau publishes a list of every surname held by 100 or more people in the United States, together with a count and a breakdown of how that name distributes across racial and ethnic groups. The most recent edition covers 2010 and lists 162,253 names between them covering about 266 million people. The remaining 29 million carry surnames too uncommon to publish individually.

That threshold matters. If your surname does not appear here, it is not an error — it means fewer than 100 people in the country had it at the last count, which already tells you something.

Why surnames cluster

First names are chosen fresh every generation and follow fashion. Surnames are inherited, so they carry the shape of migration and settlement for centuries. That is why the census breakdown is so revealing: Nguyen is overwhelmingly carried by Vietnamese-American families, Garcia by Hispanic families, and Smith is spread widely but not evenly. The tool shows that distribution exactly as the Bureau published it, including the gaps where small counts were suppressed.

Rescaling to today

The underlying count is from 2010, when the US population was about 309 million. We show both that original figure and an estimate rescaled to today’s population of roughly 342 million, so the number lines up with the rest of the site. The rescaling assumes surnames grew in proportion with the population, which is a simplification — immigration has changed the mix, so fast-growing surnames are understated here and long-established ones slightly overstated.