The Muhammad question

Muhammad is the most popular boys' name in England and Wales. 5,957 boys got it in 2025. Noah, in second place, got 4,075. That is a gap of 1,882 babies, and it is not close.

Every year the question comes up: is it really number one, or is that a trick of how the names are counted? It is a fair question, because the Office for National Statistics counts every spelling as a separate name. Sophia and Sofia are two names on its list. So are Muhammad and Mohammed. The answer is that the counting does matter for this name, more than for any other in the top 100. It just does not point the way the question assumes.

Eleven ways to spell it

We took every boys' name in the 2025 file whose consonants are M, H, M, D in that order, with only the vowels changing. That rule gives eleven spellings. It leaves out Mahmoud, which is a different name, Mehmed, the Turkish form, and Mamadou, the West African one, and it leaves out double-barrelled names such as Muhammad-Yusuf, which the ONS lists on their own. We are counting spellings, not relatives.

We do not show a rank for a spelling given to fewer than 50 boys. Below that the ONS table is full of ties and the rank means nothing.

Add the eleven up and you get 9,263 boys. There were 273,652 boys in the 2025 file, so that is one boy in every 30. Muhammad on its own is one boy in 46. Noah is one in 67.

Put another way: the eleven spellings together are bigger than Noah and Leo, second and third, added together. 4,075 and 3,278 make 7,353. The chart shows it.

This is where spelling matters more for Muhammad than for any other name. It is the only name with three spellings in the top 100. Mohammed is 20th on its own and Mohammad is 55th. The only other pairs in the top 100 are Sophia and Sofia, 13th and 17th, and Reuben and Ruben, 29th and 100th. Nothing else comes close to being split three ways at the top of the list.

So the honest answer to the question is this. If you count spellings separately, the way the ONS does, Muhammad is number one by 1,882. If you count the name as one sound, which is how a parent hears it, it is number one by more than double. There is no way of counting that puts anything else first.

Last year's rise was almost all spelling

Muhammad went from 5,721 boys in 2024 to 5,957 in 2025, up 236. Read on its own, that is a name still climbing. Read with its spellings, it is something else.

The eleven spellings added up to 9,229 boys in 2024 and 9,263 in 2025. That is a rise of 34. Mohammed fell from 1,760 to 1,712. Mohammad fell from 986 to 895. Muhammed fell from 424 to 385. The parents who would once have written Mohammad or Mohammed are writing Muhammad. The number of boys given the name, however you spell it, barely moved.

The one thing that did move is the share, and only because there were fewer boys born. 277,763 boys in the 2024 file, 273,652 in 2025. The same 9,200-odd boys are a slightly bigger slice of a slightly smaller pie: 3.3% of boys in 2024, 3.4% in 2025.

The same name in America

In America, Muhammad is 239th. Not a typo. That is where the most recent Social Security rankings put it, and the other spellings are lower still: Mohamed 527th, Mohammad 562nd, Mohammed 595th.

Adding the spellings up helps it more there than here, because the American spellings are split more evenly. In 2017, the last full year of American counts we hold, 2,745 American boys got one of 14 spellings. Muhammad had 896 of them, Mohamed 662, Mohammad 480 and Mohammed 477. The leading spelling had a third of the total. In England and Wales it has nearly two thirds.

Counted as one name, those 2,745 boys would have made it the 144th most popular boys' name in America in 2017. Counted as Muhammad alone, 239th today. So in America the counting question is worth about 95 places. In Britain it is worth none, because Muhammad is first either way.

The scale is a different world. One American boy in 668 got one of the spellings in 2017. One boy in England and Wales in 30 did in 2025. Per head, the name is more than 22 times as common here as there.

Two things in that table. First, the name has trebled in America since 1990, from 902 boys to 2,745, and from one boy in 2,275 to one in 668. It first entered the American top 1,000 in 1976, as Muhammad; Mohammad followed in 1979, and Mohammed and Mohamed in 1981.

Second, the leading spelling has changed twice. In 1990 and 2000 it was Mohammad. From 2005 to 2010 it was Mohamed. By 2017 it was Muhammad, and the rankings since say the same: Muhammad has gone from 365th in 2015 to 239th now, while Mohamed went from 451st to 527th, Mohammed from 512th to 595th and Mohammad from 545th to 562nd. America is settling on the spelling Britain already settled on.

What it means for you

If you are choosing this name, the spelling is a real choice in a way it is not for most names. Muhammad is the spelling that is growing in both countries. Mohammed and Mohammad are both still top-60 names in England and Wales, and both are shrinking. None of that says which is right. It says which one the other parents are picking.

And if you were wondering whether the number one is a quirk of the counting, it is not. Count it the strict way and it wins by 1,882. Count it the generous way and it wins by 5,188. We hold the whole file, and there is no third way.