Most Popular Baby Names in Northern Ireland (NISRA 2025)

The top 10 girls' and boys' names in Northern Ireland, 2025

These are the official figures from the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency, released on 16 April 2026 and covering every birth registered in Northern Ireland during 2025. They are counts of registrations, not estimates or survey samples, and NISRA publishes them as accredited official statistics.

Northern Ireland is its own dataset and gives its own answers. There is no single UK-wide baby names list because there is no single UK registry: NISRA covers Northern Ireland, the Office for National Statistics covers England and Wales, and National Records of Scotland covers Scotland. The Republic of Ireland is different again, counted by the Central Statistics Office.

Girls

Boys

What the 2025 figures actually show

Grace held on; Noah came back

Grace led for a second year running, and had already held first place from 2018 to 2022. Noah returned to number one after topping the list in 2018 and again in 2023. Arthur reached the boys' top 10 for the first time since the NISRA series began in 1997, tying with Jude on 101 babies.

Irish-language names take three of the girls' top 10

Fiadh, Aoife and Meabh sit second, eighth and ninth, and Oisin is sixth among boys. That is a far larger share than anywhere else in the UK. Meabh was the strongest mover in the girls' top 10, up eight places. NISRA records names as they are registered and counts accented spellings with their unaccented forms, so Meabh and Méabh are pooled in these figures.

The biggest climbers were mostly Irish

NISRA publishes a table of new entries to the top 100 showing both years' ranks, which is the honest way to read movement. Among boys, Naoise rose from 278th in 2024 to 95th in 2025, Conn from 202nd to 90th, Reggie from 144th to 69th and Micheal from 144th to 86th. Among girls, Lainey climbed from 144th to 87th, Cassie from 119th to 71st, Millie from 150th to 96th and Eala from 105th to 71st.

Where you live changes the answer

NISRA breaks the data down by local government district, and the top name differs in most of them. Noah led in Belfast, in Causeway Coast and Glens and in Armagh City, Banbridge and Craigavon; Cillian led in Derry City and Strabane; James in Fermanagh and Omagh and in Lisburn and Castlereagh; Jack in Mid Ulster and in Newry, Mourne and Down; Jude in Antrim and Newtownabbey and in Mid and East Antrim; Henry in Ards and North Down. Among girls, Fiadh topped Belfast, Derry City and Strabane, and Fermanagh and Omagh, while Grace led Mid Ulster, Lisburn and Castlereagh, and Newry, Mourne and Down. Ards and North Down chose Poppy; Antrim and Newtownabbey chose Charlotte.

The health trust breakdown sharpens the same point. In the Western trust the top five boys' names were James, Oisin, Rian, Cillian and Charlie, and the leading girls' names Fiadh, Grace and Eabha. In the South Eastern trust the leaders were Luca and Noah for boys and Emily, Lily and Sophie for girls. Two areas of the same small jurisdiction produce lists with barely any overlap.

The mother's own background shifts the list again

NISRA also cross-tabulates by the mother's country of birth. Where the mother was born in Northern Ireland, the leading names were Noah with 130 and Grace with 108. Where she was born elsewhere in the UK they were Amelia and Olivia for girls. Where she was born in one of the eight central and eastern European countries that joined the EU in 2004, the leaders included Nikodem and Leo for boys and Hanna and Olivia for girls. Where she was born outside those groups, Muhammed led the boys on 23. Age matters too: mothers under 20 most often chose Archie, mothers in their thirties chose Jack and Grace, and mothers aged 40 and over chose James and Anna.

How to read this list

Notice how small the counts are. The most popular boys' name went to 170 babies and the most popular girls' name to 127. Northern Ireland registers far fewer births than England and Wales, so a handful of registrations moves a name several places. Treat single-year rank changes near the bottom of the top 10 as noise rather than trend.

Variety is rising, not falling. NISRA counted 1,875 different boys' names and 2,225 different girls' names in 2025, both up on 2024, and 966 names were registered that had never appeared in the series before. A top-10 name is popular in a much weaker sense than the phrase suggests.

Look at the middle-name table too, because it tells a different story from the first-name one. The most common additional names given in 2025 were James with 779, John with 445 and Patrick with 321 for boys, and Rose with 478, Grace with 442 and Elizabeth with 277 for girls. Traditional family names have not gone away in Northern Ireland; they have moved into second position on the certificate.