The Most Popular Baby Name Where You Live: ONS Local Data

The top name in each region of England, plus Wales, 2025

There is no single answer to "the most popular baby name" even within England and Wales. Table 4 of the ONS datasets gives a top 10 for each region, and Table 7 names the top name for every local authority. These are registration counts for 2025, released on 9 July 2026, and they are grouped by the mother's usual area of residence rather than the place of birth.

What the local tables show

124 different girls' names win an area

Across the 318 local authorities the ONS covers, 124 different girls' names take first place and only 73 different boys' names do. Olivia tops 32 areas, Lily 24, Florence 21, Amelia 15, Elsie 13, and both Maryam and Isla 11. On the boys' side Muhammad tops 63 areas, Noah 45, Arthur 32, George 23, Oscar 17, Leo 16 and Luca 15. The concentration on the boys' side is the same effect visible in every other cut of this data.

Sofia tops London and nowhere else

Sofia is the top girls' name in London with 342 babies, and she does not lead any other English region. She is eighth for the year in England and Wales as a whole under that spelling. London consistently produces different answers from the rest of the country because its population is different, not because Londoners follow a separate fashion.

Arthur owns the south and Luca owns the north east

Arthur leads both the South East and the South West but no northern region. Luca leads the North East outright with 200 babies, a name that does not lead any other region. Noah leads three regions including Wales. This is the clearest demonstration that regional lists are not simply the national list reshuffled.

Ties are common at local level

Many local authorities have several joint top names, because at that scale the winning count can be very small. The ONS records these as ties rather than breaking them, and it suppresses figures where a count is too low to publish safely. In practice a local top name can rest on a handful of babies, so read it as flavour rather than fact.

Wales is inside the ONS release but answers differently

Wales is published as its own set of tables within the England and Wales datasets rather than as a separate registry. Olivia leads for girls with 140 babies and Noah for boys with 218, and neither matches the England-wide answer on the boys' side. The ONS has previously published a table of Welsh names showing how far apart the two rankings sit: in its 2023 bulletin Osian ranked ninth in Wales against 728th in England, and Mali sixteenth in Wales against 1,222nd in England. Wales is the sharpest illustration in the whole release that a national list can hide an entire naming tradition.

Muhammad tops 63 areas and no region in the south west

Muhammad leads four of the nine English regions and 63 individual local authorities, which is more areas than any other boys' name by a wide margin. It leads none of the South West. This is population geography rather than fashion, and it is also partly a spelling artefact: the ONS counts exact spellings as given on the birth certificate, so Muhammad, Mohammed, Mohammad, Muhammed and Mohamed are five separate entries in the table even though they transliterate the same name. Any area-level comparison inherits that split.

The rest of the UK is counted separately

There is no United Kingdom baby names list, because there is no United Kingdom birth registry. The ONS covers England and Wales. National Records of Scotland publishes Babies' First Names for Scotland. The Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency publishes Baby Names for Northern Ireland, including a breakdown by local government district. The Republic of Ireland is different again, counted by the Central Statistics Office. Any "UK top 10" you see has been stitched together by someone, usually from England and Wales alone.

How to use this

Look up your own area before you rule a name out for being too popular. A name at number one nationally may be nowhere near the top where you live, and a name you think is unusual may be the most common name in your borough. The gap between national and local is routinely larger than the gap between one year and the next.

Two cautions. The ONS groups by the mother's usual residence, so a name can be recorded in one area and grow up in another. And local counts are small, which makes them volatile: the top name in a district can change on a dozen babies and mean nothing at all.

Finally, remember what a top name is not. It is not the name most people in your area have; it is the most common name among babies registered in a single year, which in most districts is a few dozen children out of several hundred. Even a national number one accounts for well under one per cent of births. Olivia was given to 2,386 girls in 2025, out of roughly 253,000 girls whose names appear anywhere in the published list. Popularity in this dataset is a narrow lead, not a majority, and that is worth holding onto if you are worried about picking something too common.