How common is a February 29 birthday?
February 29
Top 10 least common
Rarest birthday
Rarer than 100%of other birthday dates.
1 in 1,631births in this sample share your birthday.
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February 29 is the rarest birthday in this collection: 52,561 recorded births. It happened only 5 times in the 21 years covered, while every other date happened 21 times.
Counting only the years it occurred, February 29 averages 10,512 births per occurrence, against 11,175 for an average day in the sample. Even per occurrence it is below an average day.
February 29 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 February 29 marked.
February 29 against the days around it
| Date | Total births | Rank of 366 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| February 26 | 226,182 | #324 | |
| February 27 | 228,866 | #288 | |
| February 28 | 233,125 | #197 | |
| February 29 (this date) | 52,561 | #366 | |
| March 1 | 234,495 | #176 | |
| March 2 | 227,660 | #308 | |
| March 3 | 233,405 | #188 |
February as a whole records 10,981 births per day, ranked #8 of 12 months. Month ranking · February 28 · March 1
Has February 29 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. February 29 exists in 5 of these 21 years; the 16 non-leap years are listed as unobserved, and every average here uses the leap years.
February 29 as a share of each year’s U.S. births, 1994–2014
Births on February 29 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 | unobserved | unobserved | |
| 1995 | unobserved | unobserved | |
| 1996 | 10,692 | 274.8 | |
| 1997 | unobserved | unobserved | |
| 1998 | unobserved | unobserved | |
| 1999 | unobserved | unobserved | |
| 2000 | 11,895 | 286.7 | |
| 2001 | unobserved | unobserved | |
| 2002 | unobserved | unobserved | |
| 2003 | unobserved | unobserved | |
| 2004 | 7,301 | 174.4 | |
| 2005 | unobserved | unobserved | |
| 2006 | unobserved | unobserved | |
| 2007 | unobserved | unobserved | |
| 2008 | 11,631 | 269.8 | |
| 2009 | unobserved | unobserved | |
| 2010 | unobserved | unobserved | |
| 2011 | unobserved | unobserved | |
| 2012 | 11,042 | 276.0 | |
| 2013 | unobserved | unobserved | |
| 2014 | unobserved | unobserved |
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, February 29 ranked #366 of 366 with 9,247 births per occurrence. The 1969–1988 calendar and what changed since.
February 29 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 | #162 | 100.6 | |
| England & Wales | #61 | 103.0 | |
| Denmark | #351 | 90.7 | |
| Metropolitan France | #341 | 94.5 | |
| Malaysia | #352 | 92.8 |
In the matched window the U.S. rank is #162; over the full 1994–2014 collection it is #366. 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. For February 29 the metric matters most: the full-collection ranking counts its total across only 5 leap days against 21 occurrences for every other date, which puts it last, while the matched ranking divides by the 2 occurrences it had, so it is ranked beside other dates on equal terms. 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, 3,929 have this birthday, one resident in 1,534. A count of people living there, wherever they were born. How many people in Denmark share a birthday.
Born on February 29
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.
- Dennis Farina1944–2013American actor
- Tim Powers1952American science fiction and fantasy author
- Mervyn Warren1964American songwriter
- Antonio Sabàto Jr.1972American actor
- Saul Williams1972American singer, poet, actor
- Ja Rule1976American rapper
- Simon Gagné1980Canadian ice hockey player
- Cullen Jones1984American swimmer
- Mark Foster1984American musician
- Benedikt Höwedes1988German association football player
- Eric Kendricks1992American football player
- Lydia Jacoby2004American swimmer
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, 1,586 tab sessions looked up February 29 on this site. 127 of them started there and 1,459 arrived after checking a different date first.
Checked next to: February 28 (168 sessions), January 1 (160 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 February 29 card
Keep going
- ← February 28
- March 1 →
- All February birthdays
- All 366 dates
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- How rare is a leap day birthday?
- Explore the whole calendar
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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