Names of Spain ES

INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) records Garcia as the commonest surname in Spain; the names that most distinguish Spain from the rest of the world are Maria, Jose and Manuel.

Written in Spanish, Catalan, Galician, Basque.

Population
50M
Official registers
3
Name forms recorded
217K
ABuilt from 3 official registers, 217,096 name forms in our corpus, 18 cited works.

Official registers for given names and surnames, plus a written account of the naming system.

fewerlarger share
Where the names most characteristic of Spain are borne outside it — the same spelling, counted in our record corpus. Shares are of all bearers of those names anywhere, Spain included.

How names work in Spain

5 naming traditions are in use in Spain, listed in the order of the country's languages. They are separate systems, not variants of one, and each has its own page.

The most common names in Spain

Counts not recorded by the publisher · authority tier 2
INE — Nombres más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) — 28,271 given names counted over a population the publisher did not record, girls only, as the register publishes them.
#NameBearers recordedOur rank
1Maria Carmen636K83
2Maria569K1
3Carmen358K6
4Ana Maria268K—
5Laura258K30
6Maria Pilar256K—
7Maria Dolores250K—
8Isabel250K14
9Josefa247K27
10Maria Teresa243K—
11Ana242K9
12Marta228K—
13Cristina227K18
14Maria Angeles220K—
15Lucia214K43
16Maria Isabel202K—
17Maria Jose202K—
18Francisca194K47
19Antonia189K36
20Dolores176K19

Where the two lists disagree

20 of INE — Nombres más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal)'s top 25 given names sit five or more places away in our record corpus. Neither ranking is wrong; they count different people.

INE — Nombres más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal)Across all recordsmaria carmen: 1 → 83 · ranks lower across all records1. maria carmen83maria: 2 → 12. maria1carmen: 3 → 63. carmen6ana maria: 4 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country4. ana marianot rankedlaura: 5 → 30 · ranks lower across all records5. laura30maria pilar: 6 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country6. maria pilarnot rankedmaria dolores: 7 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country7. maria doloresnot rankedisabel: 8 → 14 · ranks lower across all records8. isabel14josefa: 9 → 27 · ranks lower across all records9. josefa27maria teresa: 10 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country10. maria teresanot rankedana: 11 → 911. ana9marta: 12 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country12. martanot rankedcristina: 13 → 18 · ranks lower across all records13. cristina18maria angeles: 14 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country14. maria angelesnot rankedlucia: 15 → 43 · ranks lower across all records15. lucia43maria isabel: 16 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country16. maria isabelnot rankedmaria jose: 17 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country17. maria josenot rankedfrancisca: 18 → 47 · ranks lower across all records18. francisca47antonia: 19 → 36 · ranks lower across all records19. antonia36dolores: 20 → 1920. dolores19paula: 21 → 44 · ranks lower across all records21. paula44sara: 22 → 55 · ranks lower across all records22. sara55elena: 23 → 2423. elena24maria luisa: 24 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country24. maria luisanot rankedraquel: 25 → 48 · ranks lower across all records25. raquel48
Hover a line for what is available to explain that row.
INE — Nombres más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) on the left; every record we hold for Spain on the right. A dashed line means the name is not in our top ranks for this country at all.

The register counts one population in one year — everyone it enumerates, once. Our corpus counts records: historical registers going back decades, the diaspora, business and place records, and several generations of births. A name that was common two generations ago outranks a name common today; a name whose spelling scatters across sources (diacritics dropped, transliterated differently) loses ground, because only its dominant spelling is ranked.

Characteristic of Spain

Not the most common names — the most distinctive ones. A name appears here when Spain holds a larger share of its bearers than the world does, weighted by how much of the country's whole name distribution it accounts for.

MariaJoseManuelFranciscoCarmenJavierAntonioMiguelAngelPilarJesusJosefaMaria CarmenDoloresCarlosLuisJuanIsabelTeresaPedroNuriaLauraAnaAntoniaJose AntonioMontserratInmaculadaAlvaroFernandoRafaelConcepcionFranciscaAlmeriaMercedesFrancisco JavierEncarnacionRaquelSaraRosaMaria DoloresVicenteJoaquinLuisaAlbertoAlbaJorgeManuelaRamonLuciaEvaBegonaIgnacioRocio
Sized by how much of the difference between Spain's name distribution and the world's this name accounts for. Hover for its share here against its share worldwide.●

Scripts & spelling

Mariagiven name●
Josegiven name●
Juangiven name●
Antoniogiven name●
Manuelgiven name●
The best-attested names in Spain, in the spelling our records use there. Where a Latin spelling is also attested it is shown beneath — a spelling from the corpus, not a machine romanisation.

Countries whose names look alike

Measured as the overlap between each country's top 300 given-name forms, weighted by how common each is — the fuzzy-set approach of Lauc (2024), on a truncated inventory.

Registers & sources

Official registers

  • INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal)headline (surnames)

    Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE). Counts: not recorded. surname. 86,418 forms. Licence: Reutilizable INE.

    What we know about this register

    All surnames with frequency ≥20 residents in Spain. Padrón Municipal.

    Last verified 2026-05-09.

  • INE — Nombres más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal)headline (given)

    Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE). Counts: not recorded. given. 28,271 forms. Licence: Reutilizable INE.

    What we know about this register

    All given names with frequency ≥20 residents in Spain. Padrón Municipal.

    Last verified 2026-05-09.

  • INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos)not a population count

    Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE). Counts: residents. given and surname. 170,467 forms. Licence: Reutilizable INE.

    What we know about this register

    Per-token JSON widgets querying the current Padrón Municipal living population. GIVEN widget returns Total (living people with that given name), Sexo (hombres/mujeres → M/F), Media (avg age) and Porcentaje. APELLIDOS widget returns Total1 (count as first surname → canonical count), Total2 (as second surname) and Total3 (both); bearers = Total1+Total2-Total3 stored in data_note. Widgets are case- and accent-insensitive (normalise to uppercase unaccented). No prefix autocomplete, so queried against a seed of ~146K distinct given+surname tokens from the INE static lists (es-ine-nombres/es-ine-apellidos) plus all_official ES. Resumable scraper: scripts/fetch_es_ine.py (JSON checkpoint + raw/ES/cache); high-prior tokens queried first. year=None → data_note='ine_padron_living'.

    Last verified 2026-06-03.

Cited works

Behind this page's own account — its one-line answer, its explanation of why the rankings differ, and the notes on its registers. Each naming tradition cites its own sources on its page. Not yet checked against onomastic literature.

About this data

Official figures are reproduced from the register named beside them, at the year named beside them, and are never combined across registers. The "across all records" ranking counts records in our own corpus — historical registers, the diaspora, business and place records — and is not a population count. Bearer estimates are omitted where a name accounts for more than a quarter of a country's records, because the estimate is not defensible there. Names listed by reference works and licensed name dictionaries are cited as attesting a name; their figures are not published.

Data snapshot: 2026-09-12.

Questions

What is the most common given name in Spain?
Maria Carmen, according to INE — Nombres más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal), with 636,109 bearers recorded among girls.
What is the most common surname in Spain?
Garcia, according to INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal), with 1,446,937 bearers recorded.
Why do sources disagree about the commonest name in Spain?
Because they count different people. INE — Nombres más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) counts one population once, and its commonest given name is Maria Carmen. Our corpus counts every record we hold — historical registers, the diaspora, decades of births — and its commonest is Maria. Both are on this page, each with its denominator.
Is there one naming system in Spain?
No — 5 are described on this page (Catalan, Sardinian and Corsican, Galician, Basque, Spanish), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.

Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Spain”, https://nelma.mondonomo.ai/names/ES (data snapshot 2026-09-12). Official figures from INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); INE — Nombres más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal).