Names of Sweden SE

SCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023) records Anna as the commonest given name in Sweden; the names that most distinguish Sweden from the rest of the world are Andersson, Johansson and Karlsson.

Written in Swedish, Finnish.

Population
10M
Official registers
2
Name forms recorded
56K
BBuilt from 2 official registers (2020), 55,793 name forms in our corpus, 12 cited works.

At least one official register, plus a written account of the naming system.

The account of the naming system rests on encyclopaedia and genealogy sources; it has not yet been checked against onomastic literature.

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

How names work in Sweden

2 naming traditions are in use in Sweden, 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 Sweden

Counts not recorded by the publisher · authority tier 2

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

SCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023), 2020 — 26,591 given names counted over a population the publisher did not record.
#NameBearers recordedOur rank
1Anna97K2
2Lars83K9
3Maria83K—
4Eva79K12
5Anders77K8
6Johan74K5
7Peter62K17
8Karin60K11
9Jan58K—
10Daniel57K25
11Mikael56K23
12Erik56K4
13Per56K16
14Lena55K—
15Fredrik52K13
16Emma50K22
17Kerstin48K58
18Hans45K—
19Sara45K18
20Andreas44K21

Where the two lists disagree

16 of SCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023)'s top 25 given names sit five or more places away in our record corpus. Neither ranking is wrong; they count different people.

SCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023) 2020Across all recordsanna: 1 → 21. anna2lars: 2 → 9 · ranks lower across all records2. lars9maria: 3 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country3. marianot rankedeva: 4 → 12 · ranks lower across all records4. eva12anders: 5 → 85. anders8johan: 6 → 56. johan5peter: 7 → 17 · ranks lower across all records7. peter17karin: 8 → 118. karin11jan: 9 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country9. jannot rankeddaniel: 10 → 25 · ranks lower across all records10. daniel25mikael: 11 → 23 · ranks lower across all records11. mikael23erik: 12 → 4 · ranks higher across all records12. erik4per: 13 → 1613. per16lena: 14 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country14. lenanot rankedfredrik: 15 → 1315. fredrik13emma: 16 → 22 · ranks lower across all records16. emma22kerstin: 17 → 58 · ranks lower across all records17. kerstin58hans: 18 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country18. hansnot rankedsara: 19 → 1819. sara18andreas: 20 → 2120. andreas21stefan: 21 → 2421. stefan24magnus: 22 → 27 · ranks lower across all records22. magnus27mats: 23 → 31 · ranks lower across all records23. mats31malin: 24 → 19 · ranks higher across all records24. malin19ingrid: 25 → 68 · ranks lower across all records25. ingrid68
Hover a line for what is available to explain that row.
SCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023), 2020 on the left; every record we hold for Sweden 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 Sweden

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

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

Over time

AnnaLarsEvaMariaAnders19992020144,558
SCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023), 1999–2020 (22 years). The line is that register's own figure for each year — not a total across registers, which would count the same people twice. The publisher labels this series “flow”.

Up to five names at a time.

Scripts & spelling

Swedensurname●
Anderssonsurname●
Johanssonsurname●
Annagiven name●
Nilssonsurname●
The best-attested names in Sweden, 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

  • SCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023)2020headline (given)

    Statistics Sweden (SCB). Counts: not recorded. given. 26,591 forms. 1999–2020. Licence: CC BY 4.0.

    What we know about this register

    SCB stopped producing name statistics in 2024; responsibility transferred to Swedish Tax Agency (Skatteverket). Top 10/100 given names and top 100 surnames (≥2 bearers) by year and county. PxWeb StatBank download.

    Last verified 2026-05-09.

  • Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population)not a population count

    Swedish Tax Agency (Skatteverket). Counts: residents. given and surname. 89,457 forms. Licence: Open data.

    What we know about this register

    Per-token JSON lookup backing Skatteverket's public "how many are named X" widget, now the sole official source since SCB discontinued its own name-search in 2024. One query returns BOTH the given-name bearer count (antalFornamn) and the surname bearer count (antalEfternamn) for the same input token against the live Swedish population register (folkbokförda), updated weekly. No suppression floor observed (exact counts down to 0/1, unlike NO-SSB's floor-of-4 or HR-DZS's suppress-below-10). Accepts any Latin token incl. diacritics/hyphens/apostrophes/multi-word; malformed input returns HTTP 422 nameIsWithWrongFormat. The endpoint 403s without a session cookie from an initial GET of the search page (no CSRF token needed) -- plain curl is blocked by Skatteverket's WAF (TLS fingerprint) but Python requests/urllib3 is not. No prefix/enumeration endpoint exists, so coverage is seed-driven: distinct given+surname tokens from all_official_names_freq.parquet (cc in SE/NO/DK/FI/IS) unioned with se-scb-names.parquet, ~210K tokens. Fetcher: scripts/fetch_se_skatteverket.py (resumable; raw JSON cached under raw/SE/cache/).

    Last verified 2026-07-14.

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 Sweden?
Anna, according to SCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023) (2020), with 97,287 bearers recorded.
Is there one naming system in Sweden?
No — 2 are described on this page (Scandinavian, Finnish), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.

Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Sweden”, https://nelma.mondonomo.ai/names/SE (data snapshot 2026-09-12). Official figures from SCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023).