Names of Croatia HR

DZS — Učestalost prezimena (Popis 2021) records Horvat as the commonest surname in Croatia; the names that most distinguish Croatia from the rest of the world are Josip, Ivan and Ivana.

Written in Croatian.

Population
4.2M
Official registers
3
Name forms recorded
43K
ABuilt from 3 official registers (2021), 43,239 name forms in our corpus, 7 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 Croatia are borne outside it — the same spelling, counted in our record corpus. Shares are of all bearers of those names anywhere, Croatia included.

How names work in Croatia

Names in Croatia follow one naming tradition. Its structure, its given-name and surname stock, how to address someone and what trips software up are set out on its own page.

The most common names in Croatia

Counts not recorded by the publisher · authority tier 2

This register publishes counts, not ranks; the numbering is the order of its own figures.

DZS — Učestalost osobnih imena (Popis 2021), 2021 — 5,244 given names counted over a population the publisher did not record.
#NameBearers recordedOur rank
1Ivan107K2
2Marija94K1
3Ana65K3
4Josip62K4
5Marko46K8
6Ivana46K5
7Luka36K13
8Tomislav34K10
9Stjepan33K6
10Željko33K12
11Ivica31K14
12Ante31K11
13Mario29K16
14Nikola27K9
15Mirjana26K18
16Petar24K15
17Katarina23K17
18Damir23K26
19Vesna22K28
20Nada22K24

Where the two lists disagree

9 of DZS — Učestalost osobnih imena (Popis 2021)'s top 25 given names sit five or more places away in our record corpus. Neither ranking is wrong; they count different people.

DZS — Učestalost osobnih imena (Popis 2021) 2021Across all recordsivan: 1 → 21. ivan2marija: 2 → 12. marija1ana: 3 → 33. ana3josip: 4 → 44. josip4marko: 5 → 85. marko8ivana: 6 → 56. ivana5luka: 7 → 13 · ranks lower across all records7. luka13tomislav: 8 → 108. tomislav10stjepan: 9 → 69. stjepan6željko: 10 → 1210. željko12ivica: 11 → 1411. ivica14ante: 12 → 1112. ante11mario: 13 → 1613. mario16nikola: 14 → 9 · ranks higher across all records14. nikola9mirjana: 15 → 1815. mirjana18petar: 16 → 1516. petar15katarina: 17 → 1717. katarina17damir: 18 → 26 · ranks lower across all records18. damir26vesna: 19 → 28 · ranks lower across all records19. vesna28nada: 20 → 2420. nada24marina: 21 → 29 · ranks lower across all records21. marina29petra: 22 → 47 · ranks lower across all records22. petra47goran: 23 → 30 · ranks lower across all records23. goran30martina: 24 → 35 · ranks lower across all records24. martina35lucija: 25 → 53 · ranks lower across all records25. lucija53
Hover a line for what is available to explain that row.
DZS — Učestalost osobnih imena (Popis 2021), 2021 on the left; every record we hold for Croatia on the right. A dashed line means the name is not in our top ranks for this country at all.

The census counts residents in 2021, once each, and its commonest given name is Ivan. Our corpus counts records rather than people — historical registers, the diaspora, business and place records, several generations of births — and its commonest is Marija, because the older female given-name stock is heavier in the historical layer than in the living population. The same effect moves surnames: Kovačević is the census's second surname and only our ninth, because its spellings scatter across sources (Kovacevic, Kovačevič, Kovacević) and only the dominant spelling carries the rank, while Horvat — short, diacritic-free and stable — holds first place in both. [@dzs-2021]

Characteristic of Croatia

Not the most common names — the most distinctive ones. A name appears here when Croatia 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.

JosipIvanIvanaTomislavAnteŽeljkoIvicaMarioMirjanaAnaBrankoFranjoKataDragicaLjubicaVesnaNadaGoranKatarinaMaricaKaticaMilanMarijanAntunDamirMartinaMatijaMarijaLucijaMladenMaraAnkaMirkoSanjaDarkoPetraMilkaGordanaDragutinSnježanaJosipaZlatkoDavorZoranDanicaAntonijaIvankaNikolinaBrankaAntonioPetarRužicaAnkicaAnicaLjiljanaDraženNevenkaŽeljkaHrvojeZdravko
Sized by how much of the difference between Croatia's name distribution and the world's this name accounts for. Hover for its share here against its share worldwide.●

Scripts & spelling

Marijagiven name●
Ivangiven name●
Anagiven name●
Josipgiven name●
Ivanagiven name●
The best-attested names in Croatia, 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

  • DZS — Učestalost prezimena (Popis 2021)2021headline (surnames)

    Croatian Bureau of Statistics (DZS). Counts: not recorded. surname. 31,410 forms. 2021. Licence: Open Licence Croatia.

    What we know about this register

    31,369 surnames (≥10 bearers) from 2021 Croatian Population Census with county-level breakdown. Published by DZS, hosted via srednja.hr Excel viewer.

    Last verified 2026-05-09.

  • DZS — Učestalost osobnih imena (Popis 2021)2021headline (given)

    Croatian Bureau of Statistics (DZS). Counts: not recorded. given. 5,244 forms. 2021. Licence: Open Licence Croatia.

    What we know about this register

    5,199 given names (≥10 bearers) from 2021 Croatian Population Census with county-level breakdown. Published by DZS, hosted via srednja.hr Excel viewer.

    Last verified 2026-05-09.

  • DZS — Imena i prezimena (per-token lookup form)2021

    Croatian Bureau of Statistics (DZS). Counts: not recorded. given and surname. 31,888 forms. 2021. Licence: Open Licence Croatia.

    What we know about this register

    Per-token name/surname frequency archetype scraped from the DZS "Imena i prezimena u Republici Hrvatskoj" ASP.NET WebForms lookup (web.dzs.hr/app/imena). The form returns the number of persons bearing a given name and/or surname; counts < 10 are suppressed (not shown). No enumeration/prefix endpoint exists, so the token list is seeded from existing NELMA HR/RS/SI/BA/ME given+surname tokens (frequency-ordered) and queried token-by-token via scripts/fetch_hr_dzs.py. The form's own page text cites the 2011 Census; this dataset is labelled year=2021 / data_note=dzs_census_2021 per ingestion convention. National totals only (no region breakdown), sex not derivable. Counts differ from the srednja.hr Excel lists (hr-dzs-given-names / hr-dzs-surnames) due to a different aggregation, so this is kept as a separate source rather than merged. Validated: Ivan=130828, Horvat=21618, Kovacevic=15160.

    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. Checked against onomastic literature on 2026-09-04.

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 Croatia?
Ivan, according to DZS — Učestalost osobnih imena (Popis 2021) (2021), with 106,657 bearers recorded.
What is the most common surname in Croatia?
Horvat, according to DZS — Učestalost prezimena (Popis 2021) (2021), with 19,705 bearers recorded.
Why do sources disagree about the commonest name in Croatia?
Because they count different people. DZS — Učestalost osobnih imena (Popis 2021) (2021) counts one population once, and its commonest given name is Ivan. Our corpus counts every record we hold — historical registers, the diaspora, decades of births — and its commonest is Marija. Both are on this page, each with its denominator.

Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Croatia”, https://nelma.mondonomo.ai/names/HR (data snapshot 2026-09-12). Official figures from DZS — Učestalost prezimena (Popis 2021); DZS — Učestalost osobnih imena (Popis 2021).