How common is a December 31 birthday?
December 31
Rare
Rarer than 95.1%of other birthday dates.
1 in 391births in this sample share your birthday.
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December 31 is the 348th most common birthday of the 366 dates in this collection, and the 19th rarest. It records 219,101 births out of 85,712,738, so roughly 1 in 391 people in this sample were born on it.
It is more common than 4.9% of the other 365 dates and rarer than 95.1%, which puts it in the top 10% rarest birthdays. It records 93.4% of an average day’s count in the sample.
December 31 among all 366 dates
All 366 dates sorted from most to least common by recorded U.S. births 1994–2014, coloured by rarity tier, with December 31 marked.
December 31 against the days around it
| Date | Total births | Rank of 366 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| December 28 | 249,921 | #28 | |
| December 29 | 252,082 | #16 | |
| December 30 | 250,577 | #23 | |
| December 31 (this date) | 219,101 | #348 | |
| January 1 | 164,362 | #364 | |
| January 2 | 196,481 | #361 | |
| January 3 | 228,259 | #301 |
December as a whole records 10,991 births per day, ranked #7 of 12 months. Month ranking · December 30 · January 1
Has December 31 changed over time?
Annual U.S. birth totals changed across this window, so a raw daily count moves with the size of the year. The chart uses each year's share of that year's births instead, in births per 100,000. Averaged over the first five observed years it is 263.5 per 100,000; over the last five, 264.2 per 100,000 (+0.3%).
December 31 as a share of each year’s U.S. births, 1994–2014
Births on December 31 per 100,000 births in that year, one point per year, with the change of source at 2000 marked and the first-five and last-five year means drawn as bands.
| Year | Births on this date | Per 100,000 births | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1994 | 8,809 | 222.9 | |
| 1995 | 7,596 | 194.8 | |
| 1996 | 11,924 | 306.4 | |
| 1997 | 11,818 | 304.5 | |
| 1998 | 11,389 | 288.9 | |
| 1999 | 9,335 | 235.8 | |
| 2000 | 7,892 | 190.2 | |
| 2001 | 10,272 | 249.9 | |
| 2002 | 12,582 | 306.9 | |
| 2003 | 12,540 | 301.2 | |
| 2004 | 10,130 | 241.9 | |
| 2005 | 8,635 | 205.0 | |
| 2006 | 7,569 | 174.6 | |
| 2007 | 11,102 | 253.4 | |
| 2008 | 12,906 | 299.4 | |
| 2009 | 11,667 | 278.4 | |
| 2010 | 9,751 | 240.4 | |
| 2011 | 8,035 | 200.5 | |
| 2012 | 10,634 | 265.8 | |
| 2013 | 12,525 | 315.2 | |
| 2014 | 11,990 | 299.0 |
Source break: 1994–1999 counts come from the CDC/NCHS daily file and 2000–2014 from the Social Security Administration daily file. The overlapping years 2000–2003 are taken from the SSA file only, so each year is counted once. But the step at 2000 is a change of source as well as a change of year, and any comparison across it includes that change.
The weekday the date fell on, scheduling practice and recording practice are all inside these lines.
A generation earlier, in the separate daily file for 1969–1988, December 31 ranked #124 of 366 with 9,718 births per occurrence. The 1969–1988 calendar and what changed since.
December 31 in five countries
Countries are compared only over the matched years 2007–2014, which all five sources cover completely, and using births per occurrence so that leap day is handled the same way everywhere. Each country's records are counted on their own.
| Country | Rank of 366 | Index (100 = average day) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | #233 | 98.3 | |
| England & Wales | #44 | 103.7 | |
| Denmark | #362 | 80.6 | |
| Metropolitan France | #321 | 96.0 | |
| Malaysia | #333 | 94.9 |
In the matched window the U.S. rank is #233; over the full 1994–2014 collection it is #348. The two numbers answer different questions and usually differ for two reasons at once: the window is eight years against twenty-one, and the metric is births per occurrence against the total across the whole period. Every figure on this page names its window and its metric. Full five-country study.
Among the 6,025,603 people living in Denmark on January 1, 2026, 14,592 have this birthday, one resident in 413. A count of people living there, wherever they were born. How many people in Denmark share a birthday.
Born on December 31
12 people from the English Wikipedia “On this day” birth lists, oldest first. A reading list. Every birth figure on this page comes from the national records.
- Rita Lee1947–2023Brazilian musician, author, actress and television host
- Jean-Pierre Rives1952France international rugby union player
- Jane Badler1953American actress and singer
- Val Kilmer1959–2025American actor
- Jennifer Higdon1962American composer
- Tyrone Corbin1962American basketball player and coach
- Bryon Russell1970American basketball player
- Ricky Whittle1979English actor
- Richie McCaw1980New Zealand international rugby union player
- Corey Crawford1984Canadian ice hockey player
- Jonathan Horton1985American artistic gymnast
- Gabby Douglas1995American artistic gymnast
Names and descriptions from English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0, retrieved 2026-09-11; curated arts/science/sport entries, years 1800–2008. not a celebrity census. conflicting identities excluded.
How this date was explored here
Site usage. Between September 11, 2026 at 07:05 UTC and September 15, 2026 at 10:38 Pacific time, 580 tab sessions looked up December 31 on this site. 72 of them started there and 508 arrived after checking a different date first.
Checked next to: January 1 (150 sessions). Consecutive requests inside one tab session.
Counts are tab sessions. Checked dates are the dates people looked up. The rarity figures above come from birth records. How these counts were made · Open the December 31 card
Keep going
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Sources, method and limits
Main ranking: 85,712,738 recorded U.S. births on 7,670 calendar dates, 1994–2014. CDC/NCHS daily counts for 1994–1999 and Social Security Administration daily counts for 2000–2014, as compiled by FiveThirtyEight and attributed under CC BY 4.0. The overlapping years 2000–2003 are counted once.
Ranks compare totals across the 366 observed month-and-day dates. February 29 occurred 5 times in this window; every other date occurred 21 times, so per-occurrence figures are used wherever seasonality is compared.
Every figure above comes from the administrative records named here, at the granularity those records publish: a day, a month or a year. Coverage and definitions differ between countries and eras, so two sources are combined only where their documentation states the windows are separate, and the page where that happens says so.
Full method, leap-day treatment and definitions.
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