Baby Names by Mother's Age: The ONS Age-Band Tables

The top 10 girls' names in each age band, 2025

Table 8 of the ONS baby names datasets splits the top 100 by the age of the mother at the birth. It is the least-read table in the release and the most revealing, because it shows that "the most popular name in Britain" is four different answers depending on who you ask. These are registration counts for England and Wales in 2025, released on 9 July 2026.

What the split actually shows

Olivia is a name older mothers choose

Olivia is the number one girls' name in England and Wales for the year as a whole. In the under-25 band she is twentieth. She is fourth among mothers aged 25 to 29, second among mothers aged 30 to 34, and first among mothers aged 35 and over. That is a clean gradient, and it means the national number one is not the number one for a large share of the parents reading it.

Delilah runs the other way

Delilah tops the under-25 list and falls to twenty-first among mothers aged 25 to 29. She does not appear in the top 25 for either older band. Arabella, second among the youngest mothers, is fifteenth among mothers aged 25 to 29. Nevaeh sits twenty-second in the youngest band and nowhere near it elsewhere. These are the names where maternal age is doing the most work.

The classics cluster among older mothers

Charlotte is third and Sophia fourth among mothers aged 35 and over, and neither appears in the top 10 for any younger band. Grace, Emily and Sophie all sit inside the top 25 for the oldest band only. The pattern is that longer, more formal names rise with maternal age and short revived Edwardian names such as Mabel, Elsie and Lottie fall with it.

Boys show almost none of this

Muhammad was the most popular boys' name in every one of the four age bands. That single fact is the most important thing in the table, and it repeats a pattern the ONS has noted for years: parents choose from a much smaller pool of boys' names. The ONS reported 35,000 unique girls' names against 29,560 unique boys' names in its 2023 bulletin, and the 2025 full lists show the same shape, with 7,617 girls' names given to three or more babies against 6,583 boys' names.

The overlap between the bands is larger than the differences

It is easy to over-read four different winners. Isla appears in the top 10 of all four bands. Isabella appears in three, Elsie in three, Amelia in three, Florence in three, Lily in three and Poppy in two. Roughly half of each band's top 10 is shared with the band next to it. The honest summary is that British parents of every age are choosing from broadly the same pool of names, and ordering it slightly differently. What changes is emphasis, not vocabulary.

The names that move most are short and recently revived

Mabel is third among the youngest mothers, eighth among mothers aged 25 to 29 and twenty-fourth among mothers aged 30 to 34. Lottie is tenth in the youngest band and sixteenth in the next. Harper is seventh among the youngest and eighteenth in the next band. All three are short forms or surnames that were revived recently, and all three drop as maternal age rises. Meanwhile Matilda, Grace, Evelyn and Phoebe hold up or climb across the same range. If there is a single readable pattern in this table, that is it: newer revivals concentrate among younger mothers and established long forms concentrate among older ones.

Why this table exists, and what it cannot tell you

The ONS records the age of the mother because it is captured at registration, not because it studies naming. That means three cautions apply. The bands are wide, so "35 and over" pools a 35-year-old with a 45-year-old. Only the mother's age is recorded in this table, so nothing here describes the other parent. And age is confounded with almost everything else — region, first or later child, and the make-up of local populations — so none of these differences is evidence that age itself causes the choice.

It is also worth being plain that this is a table about mothers because that is the field the registry holds. It is not a judgement about which names are better. Delilah and Olivia are both ordinary, well-established names with long histories.

How to use this

The practical use is calibration. If you are choosing a name and you want to know how common it will feel in your child's class, the band closest to your own age is a better guide than the headline top 10. A name at number one nationally can be twentieth among the parents you will actually stand next to at the school gate.

The second use is to stop treating the national list as a verdict. Four bands, four different winners, one dataset. If a name you love sits low in the national ranking, check whether it sits low in your band before you conclude anything at all.