Names of Poland PL
dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) records Nowak as the commonest surname in Poland; the names that most distinguish Poland from the rest of the world are Małgorzata, Agnieszka and Elzbieta.
Written in Polish.
- Population
- 38M
- Official registers
- 4
- Name forms recorded
- 130K
Official registers for given names and surnames, plus a written account of the naming system.
How names work in Poland
Names in Poland 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 Poland
| # | Name | Bearers recorded | Our rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Anna | 1.1M | 1 |
| 2 | Katarzyna | 602K | 5 |
| 3 | Małgorzata | 572K | 11 |
| 4 | Maria | 567K | 2 |
| 5 | Agnieszka | 545K | 13 |
| 6 | Ewa | 470K | 15 |
| 7 | Barbara | 468K | 14 |
| 8 | Magdalena | 434K | 18 |
| 9 | Elżbieta | 405K | — |
| 10 | Joanna | 402K | 22 |
| 11 | Aleksandra | 390K | 28 |
| 12 | Krystyna | 383K | 24 |
| 13 | Monika | 377K | 32 |
| 14 | Zofia | 360K | 19 |
| 15 | Natalia | 320K | 31 |
| 16 | Julia | 315K | 35 |
| 17 | Teresa | 312K | 26 |
| 18 | Karolina | 295K | 37 |
| 19 | Marta | 289K | — |
| 20 | Danuta | 286K | 38 |
Where the two lists disagree
19 of dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names)'s top 25 given names sit five or more places away in our record corpus. Neither ranking is wrong; they count different people.
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 Poland
Not the most common names — the most distinctive ones. A name appears here when Poland 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.
Scripts & spelling
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
- dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names)headline (given)
Ministry of Digital Affairs / MSWiA, Poland (dane.gov.pl). Counts: residents. given and surname. 419,791 forms.
What we know about this register
Auto-backfilled registry stub (2026-06-05); verify publisher/URL. 899,414 rows, name_types=['given', 'surname'], evidence=['count']. source note: pesel_registry_living
Last verified 2026-06-05.
- dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames)2026headline (surnames)
Ministry of Digital Affairs / MSWiA, Poland (dane.gov.pl). Counts: residents. surname. 419,791 forms. 2026.
What we know about this register
Auto-backfilled registry stub (2026-06-05); verify publisher/URL. 828,264 rows, name_types=['surname'], evidence=['count']. source note: dane.gov.pl PESEL living persons, as of 2026-01-20
Last verified 2026-06-05.
Ministerstwo Cyfryzacji (Ministry of Digitalization). Counts: residents. given. 52,446 forms. 2026. Licence: CC0.
What we know about this register
PESEL living-register given names as of 2026-01-20. Captures the name-position distinction the older pl-pesel-living lacks: name_subtype=first (imię pierwsze, living persons) and name_subtype=second (imię drugie, incl. deceased). Tabular API caps pagination at 10000 rows, so full resources fetched via the CSV download (csv_file_url). Surnames from the same 2026-01-20 release are already covered by pl-pesel-surnames (resources 1148808/1148811) and intentionally not re-imported here.
Last verified 2026-06-04.
Ministerstwo Cyfryzacji (Ministry of Digitalization). Counts: not recorded. given. 1,020 forms. Licence: CC0.
What we know about this register
From PESEL register. Names ≥2 occurrences (≥5 before 2013). Voivodeship-level breakdown. Semi-annual H1/H2 releases also available. Also accessible via dane.gov.pl REST API.
Last verified 2026-05-09.
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 Poland?
- Piotr, according to dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names), with 686,017 bearers recorded among boys.
- What is the most common surname in Poland?
- Nowak, according to dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) (2026), with 99,738 bearers recorded among girls.
- Why do sources disagree about the commonest name in Poland?
- Because they count different people. dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) counts one population once, and its commonest given name is Piotr. Our corpus counts every record we hold — historical registers, the diaspora, decades of births — and its commonest is Anna. Both are on this page, each with its denominator.
Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Poland”, https://nelma.mondonomo.ai/names/PL (data snapshot 2026-09-12). Official figures from dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names); dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames).