Olivia's 10-Year Reign: 100 Years of BC's Most Popular Baby Names

Olivia has been BC's most popular name for baby girls for 10 years in a row, every year from 2016 to 2025. In 2025, 172 BC babies got the name. Across Canada, though, Olivia just lost the top spot: Charlotte was the country's #1 girls' name in 2025. On the boys' side, Noah (219 babies) is back at #1 in BC after Oliver's one-year turn in 2024.

BC's Vital Statistics Agency publishes every name given to five or more babies a year, going back to 1926. That's 100 years and 4,795 names. I downloaded the girls' and boys' files, lined them up against Statistics Canada's national name counts, and went looking for the fun stuff: the longest reigns, the names that vanished, and the names that are far more popular in BC than anywhere else in the country.

Below: a name finder for any name on the list, the #1 name every year since 1926, a decade picker, the "BC-iest" names, a quiz, and a note on where the Jessicas and Michaels of the late '80s are now: house hunting.

Look up any name

Type a first name, or tap one of the shortcuts. You'll get every year's count since 1926, the peak year, its 2025 rank in BC and across Canada, and the year by which half of all the BC babies with that name had been born. That last one is a decent guess at how old a name "sounds".

Spelling matters. The province counts each spelling as its own name, so Sophia and Sofia, or Léo and Leo, are separate entries. If a name isn't there at all, it means no single year had five or more BC babies with exactly that spelling.

The 2025 top 10

BC and the rest of Canada mostly agree, with a few West Coast quirks. Oliver is #2 for boys in BC but #6 nationally. Isla is #5 here and #14 across Canada, and Hazel is #7 here versus #23. Henry (150) and James (135) both made BC's boys' top 10 while sitting just outside it nationally.

The counts are smaller than you might think. BC had about 44,889 births in 2025, by Statistics Canada's estimate, so even the #1 name, Olivia, went to 0.4% of all BC babies born that year. A generation ago, the top names were far more crowded (more on that below).

Every #1 since 1926

For most of the 20th century, BC's top boys' names barely moved. Robert held #1 for 22 straight years, from 1937 to 1958, and in his peak year, 1955, 900 BC baby boys got the name. Michael then owned most of 1967 to 1993, with a few interruptions from Jason, Christopher and Matthew. The girls' list turned over faster: Mary, Shirley, Margaret, Patricia, Sharon, Linda, Susan, Sandra, Karen, Lisa, and then Jennifer's 15-year run from 1971 to 1985.

Since 2003, the girls' #1 has rotated between just three names (Emma, Ava and Olivia). The boys' top spot has been busier: since 2002, Ethan, Jacob, Liam, Oliver, Lucas and Noah have all had a turn.

Jennifer is the biggest name in the girls' file: 15,961 BC babies since 1926, peaking at 764 in 1984. Olivia's best year, 2010, was 302 babies, well under half of Jennifer's peak. Being #1 today takes fewer babies, partly because parents now spread their choices across far more names.

Pick a decade

Every decade's top 10, girls and boys. If you want to know what your parents' friends were called, try the 1950s: Linda, Susan and Patricia for girls, and Robert, David and John for boys.

The BC-iest names

BC had 11.9% of Canada's births from 2021 to 2025. So if a name is about as popular here as anywhere else, roughly 12% of the Canadian babies with that name should be British Columbians. Some names blow way past that.

Bowen is the BC-iest boys' name in the country: 323 of the 935 baby Bowens born in Canada from 2021 to 2025 were born here, 35%. Yes, there's an island with the same name a ferry ride from Horseshoe Bay. No, I can't prove the two are related, but I have my suspicions. The rest of the top 15 runs from Gurbaaz, Arjan and Fateh to Bodhi, Lachlan and Rhys.

For girls it's Juniper: 27% of Canada's baby Junipers were born in BC. Rehmat, Asees and Mehar come next, and further down are Summer, Poppy, Amber and River, which sound like they were named at a trailhead on the Sea-to-Sky. My read: nature names are a West Coast thing, while the names at the very top are much the same coast to coast.

Riley is the closest thing BC has to a 50/50 name right now: 200 girls and 174 boys from 2021 to 2025. Charlie, River and Parker lean boy; Quinn and Remi lean girl.

Climbers and fallers

The biggest mover of the last decade is Theodore: 95 BC babies in 2015, 184 in 2025, and #3 for boys. Add Theo, which climbed from 31 to 93, and 277 BC boys got one of the two in 2025, more than got Noah (219). Emma dropped the most, from 257 to 123, and Hunter fell from 170 to 46.

How old does a name sound?

For every name with at least 3,000 BC babies, I found the year by which half of them had been born. It's not the age of people living in BC today (people move in, move away and die), but it's a fair way to tell why some names feel like a grandparent and others like a preschool roll call.

Dorothy is the most vintage big name in the file: half of BC's Dorothys were born by 1943. On the boys' side it's George (1951). At the other end, half of all BC Amelias and Olivers were born in 2015 or later.

Linda is the most dramatic case. In 1949, 652 BC baby girls were named Linda. In 2025, it was fewer than five, too few for the list. Susan, Amanda, Sandra, Karen and Patricia went the same way.

Spreading out

Statistics Canada's national file starts in 1991 and shows how much parents have spread out. In 1991, 3.0% of Canada's baby girls were named Jessica and 2.8% of boys were named Michael. In 2025, Charlotte had 1.0% and Noah 1.4%. The top name now goes to about 1 baby in 100, not 1 in 34.

The Jessicas and Michaels are house hunting

Here's the real estate part. The BC babies of 1986 to 1996 turn 30 to 40 in 2026. Their most common names were Jessica, Sarah, Amanda, Ashley, Jennifer for girls and Michael, Matthew, Christopher, Ryan, Kyle for boys. That's 4,803 Jessicas and 5,396 Michaels born in BC in those 11 years, before you count anyone who moved here.

For where prices are heading, my Greater Vancouver market update has the latest benchmark numbers, and is it a good time to buy in Vancouver? runs the payment math. For more open-data fun, see Canada's most common city trees and when it snows in Vancouver. Curious what your current place would sell for? Get an instant evaluation.

How I did this

I downloaded the BC Vital Statistics Agency's girls' and boys' name files (1926–2025, published January 2026) and Statistics Canada's first-names table (Canada, 1991–2025) on October 15, 2026. The query and download URLs are saved with the research for this post. Both sources only list a name in a year when five or more babies got it, so a 0 in this post means "fewer than five", not necessarily none. The province counts names from birth registrations; Statistics Canada counts by the mother's province of residence and drops accents (Léo and Leo are one name there), so for the BC-versus-Canada comparison I merged BC's accented and unaccented spellings.

The "BC-iest" ranking divides each name's BC count for 2021–2025 by its Canadian count for the same years, for names with at least 500 Canadian babies, and compares it to BC's 11.9% share of all births (215,954 of 1,821,124, from Statistics Canada's quarterly estimates). "Half born by" is the median birth year of all BC babies with the name since 1926. Rankings use the count of babies; ties share a rank.

What I left out on purpose: I don't comment on where any name comes from or what it says about the families who chose it. The jokes here are about names, decades and islands, not people. Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – British Columbia, and Statistics Canada data used under the Statistics Canada Open Licence.