Spanish and Hispanic baby names in the United States

This is not a page about Spain

Naming in Spain and Hispanic naming in the United States are different subjects with different data behind them. Spain's rankings come from the Instituto Nacional de Estadística and reflect a single country. American Hispanic naming is measured by the Social Security Administration, covers families with roots in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia and elsewhere, and includes names that are not Spanish at all. The Census Bureau's definition of Hispanic origin is self-identified and independent of race, which is worth knowing before reading any statistic about the population.

What the SSA 2025 list shows

These are national figures for babies born in the United States in 2025, released by the Social Security Administration on 8 May 2026 and compiled from Social Security card applications. The agency does not tabulate by ethnicity, so what follows is the position of Spanish and Spanish-associated names in the national list rather than a Hispanic-only ranking.

Santiago is worth unpacking, because it is three words fused into one: Sant Iago, Saint James, the patron of Spain. Thiago and Tiago are the Portuguese short forms of the same fusion, and Diego is a Spanish name whose long-assumed link to Santiago is disputed rather than settled. Four names in one family, one of them contested.

The two-surname system

In Spain and across most of Latin America a person carries two surnames: the father's first, then the mother's. Ana García López is the daughter of a García and a López, and she does not lose either on marriage. This is not a middle name and a surname; it is two surnames.

American forms usually provide one surname field, so one of the two is dropped or the pair is hyphenated, and which one survives is often arbitrary. The consequence is that a child and a parent may appear to have different surnames on American paperwork while having exactly the same name in Spanish terms. Anyone naming a child in a Hispanic family in the United States runs into this at the hospital, and it is worth deciding in advance rather than at the desk.

Compound first names

Compound given names are ordinary in Spanish and are treated as one name rather than a first and a middle: José María for a man, María José for a woman, and a long series of María compounds — María Elena, María Fernanda, María Guadalupe. Guadalupe is used for boys and girls alike, which surprises people who expect Marian names to be feminine. In the SSA files the two halves are usually recorded separately, so a child called José María contributes to the count for Jose, and the compound disappears from the statistics entirely.

The Marian names

A large group of Spanish women's names come from titles of the Virgin Mary rather than from words chosen for their meaning: Guadalupe, Dolores, Mercedes, Rosario, Pilar, Carmen, Consuelo, Soledad, Milagros. Translated one word at a time they read oddly — sorrows, mercies, solitude — because they are abbreviations of titles rather than descriptions of a child. Several have short forms that have become names in their own right: Lola from Dolores, Chelo from Consuelo, Charo from Rosario. Guadalupe alone is shortened at least four ways — Lupe, Lupita, Pita and Guada — which is a fair measure of how much everyday use a name has had in Mexico and the American southwest.

Nahuatl and indigenous names

A growing share of Mexican-American naming draws on indigenous languages rather than Spanish. Citlali is Nahuatl for star, from citlalin. Xóchitl is flower. Itzel is Maya. Nahuatl is still spoken by well over a million people in Mexico, so these are living-language names rather than revivals. Yaretzi is often listed with them and should not be: it is a modern coinage with no attested Nahuatl source, whatever the meaning attached to it online.

What the SSA data can and cannot tell you

Two limits are worth understanding before drawing conclusions from any of these figures. The first is that the Social Security Administration does not record ethnicity in the baby names files, so nobody can produce a genuine Hispanic-only ranking from them. What you can see is the position of Spanish-origin names in the national list, which is a proxy and not the thing itself.

The second is that the SSA also publishes rankings by state, and those are far more revealing than the national list for this subject. A name that sits outside the national top 100 can be inside the top ten in Texas, California, New Mexico or Florida, because the Hispanic share of births varies enormously between states. If you are trying to work out how a name will read where you live, the state tables are the ones to open.

Accents, and what the data does to them

Spanish uses acute accents and the tilde, and both carry information: José and Jose are not the same spelling, and María stresses a different syllable from Maria. The SSA's published files use plain unaccented spellings, so every name in the table above appears without the marks it would carry in Spanish. That is a limitation of the dataset, not of the names, and it is one more reason to treat a popularity list as a count of registrations rather than a record of how a family writes its child's name.