2026 nonbinary name survey: results
While the big annual survey continues (until 13th August), I'm here to give you the results of the nonbinary name survey!
This is on the blog because it's technically a side survey for fun. The survey ran from 5th July to 3rd August, and there were 11,340 usable responses. You can see the spreadsheet of results here.
The required opening checkbox was intended to make sure that everyone fit the usual criteria:
Yes, I confirm that I don't really fit into just one of the two boxes of "always, solely and completely a woman/girl" or "always, solely and completely a man/boy".
Here's that top 20 as a graph, for the visual-brained folks:
The gender intentions of 18 of the top 20 names was "gender-neutral"; the two exceptions were Eli and Jack, where people were more likely to be aiming for something more masculine.
Here's the last name survey I ran, in 2023. The design was quite different, but the top 4 were the same names in the same order. The top 10 are the same names in a different order, but with one change: last time Kit was in the top 10 (this year it's at #17), and this time Lee is in the top 10 instead (last year it was #20).
This time I gave participants three slots to enter names. 20,118 names were entered in total, of which 2,358 (about 12%) were entered more than once. 22% of participants used all three slots, which seems like a lot to me, and maybe if I do this again I should provide more slots.
There were 8 names in the top 100 where people entering that name were more likely than not to be keeping a birth name:
Hannah (93.8% of Hannahs were keeping a birth name)
On the flipside, there were seven names entered over 20 times that were exclusively chosen by the participants themselves:
Here's a graph of the gender intentions of each name:
Of the names that were not given at birth, here are the gender intention options and their top 3 names in each:
Which means, this time, we have achieved our goal and discovered that:
the nonbinariest name is Echo! (24 people, 0.21% of participants.)
the most common name among nonbinary people is Alex, with an incredible 1 in ~55 nonbinary people going by this name.
And finally, despite the stereotype that nonbinary names are all three characters long, the most common number of characters in all names entered (including every name entry counted individually, and including names entered only once) is 4 or 5. Here's a graph:
As promised, the full spreadsheet of results doesn't contain individual responses, and any name entered only once is left out of the list. This is because names are identifying information and I don't want to risk anyone accidentally outing themselves due to having a very unusual or unique name.
Here's the results spreadsheet link again. Enjoy!
[ Take part in the 2026 Gender Census before 13th August 2026 ]
2026-08-03: Updated "Gender intentions" graph due to dramatic miscount of blank entries. I was including the blank cells from people who hadn't even been taken to that page and hadn't seen the question!
2026-08-05: Name counts and ranking order were correct but I used the number of names entered to calculate the percentages instead of the number of participants, because those two numbers were right next to each other in my spreadsheet and I picked the wrong one by accident. I have corrected the percentages in the list and elsewhere, and the graph and its alt text.
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