Map Shows Most Common Surnames in Every U.S. State

Surnames often tell the story of a person’s family history and ethnic roots and give an indication of cultural and geographic shifts that have taken place over the centuries.
The U.S. is almost entirely made up of immigrants and their descendants, so the popularity and dominance of particular family names can shine a light on the immigratory patterns that have shaped the country and its regions.
In 2023, Ancestry.com reviewed phone book listings nationwide to determine the most common surnames in every U.S. state.
The map below shows the results of Ancestry.com’s investigation, giving an insight into the historical patterns that have dictated the popularity of names across the U.S.
Smith is by far the most common surname in the U.S., holding the top spot in 40 states and ranking in the top three in a further five.
Like Baker, Fisher or Glover, Smith began as an occupational surname for those who worked with metal, its roots tracing back to the ancient Anglo-Saxon and medieval English periods.
According to Richard Coates, a professor of onomastics at the University of the West of England, Smith has remained the most common surname in England, and became so “because the smith’s job in an English village was the principal specialized job – every village/manor needed one, and it was important enough to ‘buy’ a skilled man out of his basic farming role.”
The name was carried over the Atlantic by European immigrants during both the first wave of English settlers and the later periods of Irish and Scottish immigration.
The resulting prevalence in the 19th and early 20th centuries led many German immigrants to anglicize their own surnames, such as Schmitz or Schmidt, into Smith in an effort to assimilate, according to familytree.com. It gained wider usage among Native Americans who wanted more English sounding names when dealing with settlers, and the significant amount of English Smiths owning slaves in the 19th century meant it went on to achieve wider usage among African Americans.
Besides Smith, Williams and Johnson are the most common surnames in the U.S., with at least one of these featuring in the top three of every state besides Hawaii, California and New Mexico.
Like Smith, these names were likely carried over by English and European immigrants, and Coates told Newsweek that these have similarly dominated for centuries in the U.K.
Unlike Smith, Johnson is a patronymic surname, literally meaning son-of-John, which Coates said was due to the name John having been historically the most common given name up until the late 20th Century.
Hawaii’s most common surnames – Lee, Wong and Kim – do not appear in any other top three list in the U.S. While the name Lee has English, Irish and Norwegian origins, its prevalence in Hawaii is mostly likely the result of Aloha State’s Asian influence.
According to Boston University’s Korean Diaspora Project, when the then-sovereign state was annexed by the U.S. in 1898, plantation owners in Hawaii requiring cheap labor led to an influx of Chinese workers from Canton, as well as laborers from Korea.
According to 2020 Census Bureau data, nearly 57 percent of Hawaii’s population is now Asian or Asian in combination with another ethnicity.
California had two Spanish last names – Hernandez and Lopez – which did not feature in the top three of any other state.
However, the most common surname in California, Garcia, remains popular in Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and Texas, alongside such names as Martinez and Chavez. According to Ancestry.com, this is due to these states’ “large Latino populations.”
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