How popular is the name Chad?

The 2020 census counted 208,927 men named Chad in the United States, making it the 126th most common male name among living Americans. Social Security records show 96 boys given the name in 2025, ranking it 1,701st.

Chad took off fast. In 1965, 1,172 boys got the name. Six years later, 12,137 did. It peaked in 1972 at 13,392 births and ranked 25th that year and the next, its best showing. It stayed in the top 100 boys' names every year from 1969 through 1990.

Social Security has recorded 240,728 boys named Chad since 1880, and about three of every four were born in the 1970s or 1980s. That makes the typical Chad a man in his forties or fifties. In 2019 the name fell out of the top 1,000 boys' names for the first time since 1945.

Chad is used online these days as internet slang. Merriam-Webster defines it as "a stereotypical alpha male; a man, admired or scorned for brazen self-confidence." The dictionary traces the usage to the early 2000s. In the 2010s, the online incel community adopted it for the handsome, swaggering man it resented. By the early 2020s it had picked up a positive meaning, praise for a confident man, along with the exaggerated version, "Gigachad."

One way to test whether that hurt the name is to compare Chad with boys' names that peaked in the same years and have been fading for the same generational reasons.

Chad fell 69 percent from 2015 to 2025, more than any other name in the group. Shane was close behind at 64 percent, and Brian, which peaked in exactly the same year, fell 56 percent. Scott and Heath barely moved.

That is a smaller gap than the one we found for the name Karen, which fell 60 percent from 2019 to 2025 while names that peaked in the same year fell 35 to 41 percent. Chad's slide looks more like a steeper version of the decline its whole generation of names has been in. Births this small also bounce around: Chad hit 90 in 2024, then ticked up to 96 last year.

Among living men, Chad ranks highest in the upper Midwest. It is the 59th most common male name in South Dakota, 63rd in Iowa, 65th in North Dakota, and 66th in Minnesota. Ohio has the most Chads, 16,349, followed by Michigan with 13,050. The census also counted 217 women named Chad.

We looked at the name Claude the same way. The most common names among all living Americans are in the most common first names in America, and any name can be looked up on the names page.

Sources

Annual birth counts and ranks are from the Social Security Administration's national baby names file, 1880 through 2025, which lists names given to at least five babies of one sex in a year. Counts of living people are from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2020 first-name tabulation, and state ranks and counts from its 2020 state-level first-name tabulation. The slang definition and its history are from Merriam-Webster's slang entry for Chad. The Social Security figures do not measure why parents stopped choosing the name.