Age from name: how old the people with a first name are
Send a first name and get back the median age of the living people who have it, the range that holds the middle half of them, and the range for the middle 80%. Brittany in the United States: median 36, half of them between 32 and 38. Mildred: median 77. The answer describes a group, so it always comes with its spread.
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A median and two ranges, not a single guess
A first name says something about when a person was born, because names go in and out of fashion. It does not say much about one person: for most names the middle half of the people who share it spans 10 to 25 years. A single number would hide that, so every answer carries age_range (25th to 75th percentile) and age_range_80 (10th to 90th), the median birth year, and how many living people the estimate rests on.
Names with a sharp fashion peak give tight ranges: Brittany peaked around 1990, and half of all living Brittanys are between 32 and 38. Classic names give wide ones: Kevin in the United States runs from 33 to 60 for the middle half.
curl "https://namegender.com/api/v1/age?name=Brittany" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"
# "age": 36,
# "age_range": { "low": 32, "high": 38 },
# "age_range_80": { "low": 28, "high": 41 },
# "birth_year": 1990,
# "sample_size": 353775,
# "country": "US",
# "source": "ssa"Copy failed. Select and copy the text.
Examples
Ages in 2026. The same name can belong to a different generation in another country: Kevin is a 1990s name in France and a much older one in the United States.
| Name | Country | Median age | Middle half | Middle 80% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mildred | United States | 77 | 67–85 | 53–92 |
| Linda | United States | 73 | 66–77 | 58–80 |
| Jennifer | United States | 47 | 41–53 | 32–58 |
| Brittany | United States | 36 | 32–38 | 28–41 |
| Liam | United States | 10 | 5–14 | 3–21 |
| Nathalie | France | 57 | 53–60 | 47–62 |
| Kevin | France | 34 | 30–37 | 24–40 |
| Kevin | United States | 47 | 33–60 | 21–67 |
| Kari | Norway | 66 | 56–73 | 42–78 |
| Nora | Norway | 17 | 9–25 | 4–33 |
How it is calculated
The method is the one FiveThirtyEight used in 2014. Official birth records give the number of babies registered with each name, by sex and year. Each birth year is then weighted by the share of that cohort still alive today, from the cohort life tables of the US Social Security Administration (Actuarial Study 120). What remains is an estimate of the living people with the name, by birth year, and the percentiles are read from it. Our US figures agree with FiveThirtyEight’s published ones once their 2014 ages are moved to 2026.
Three countries have birth series long enough to do this honestly: the United States (Social Security Administration, births 1880–2024), France (INSEE, 1900–2025) and Norway (Statistics Norway, 1945–2025). Countries whose records start in the 1970s or later would make every traditional name look young, so they are not offered. Without a country hint the US series is used and the response says so; another country returns country_not_covered and costs nothing.
For names that moved between genders, send the gender you already know. Men called Leslie have a median age of 66, women 50.
In a spreadsheet, =NAMEGENDER_AGE(A2:A500) in Google Sheets and =NAMEGENDER.AGE(A2:A500) in Excel fill a column with median ages, or with the middle half when you add "range". The ten client libraries, Zapier, Make, n8n and the MCP server for AI assistants have it too.
What it cannot tell you
People born abroad are in no birth series, so a name that is common among immigrants looks younger than the people who carry it. Norway’s series starts in 1945, so Norwegians born earlier are missing. The US life table is used for France and Norway as well; the difference in survival between these countries is small next to the spread of any name.
Use it for groups: the age profile of a customer list, the birth-year mix of a survey sample, an age column for aggregate reporting when the data has none. Do not use it to decide anything about one person. It is not an age check, and credit, hiring, housing, insurance and eligibility decisions must never rest on it.
Questions
What does it cost?
One credit per name, including names that are not found. A country outside the United States, France and Norway costs nothing. A bulk endpoint takes up to 100 names per request.
How accurate is it for one person?
Not very, and no name-based method can be. Half of the people with a name fall inside age_range; the other half do not. That is why the range is always returned with the median.
Can I send a full name?
Yes. The first name is taken from it, the same way as on the gender endpoints.
Which countries are covered?
The United States, France and Norway. Other countries do not publish name counts by birth year far enough back.
Related pages
Flag “asdf qwerty”, “Test Test” or “Mickey Mouse” in sign-up and lead forms, with the reasons. Real names like Jennifer Null pass. 1 credit.
Turn a name into “Sehr geehrte Frau Dr. Müller,”, “Sayın Ahmet Bey,” or “Madame,” in one call. Neutral when the gender is not certain. 1 credit.
Researchers get 100,000 free name-to-gender credits for non-commercial studies, with counted evidence per answer and a versioned dataset to cite.
The median living Betty is 78, Brittany 36 and Liam 10. Ages of first names from birth records, with fad names, comeback names and US vs France.
Some ordinary names flip gender across borders, and the error is systematic rather than random. What the country parameter does, and where the data comes from.
Check it against your own list
Every number on this page is reproducible with a free key. If your data breaks it, that is the more interesting result.