How common is a January 17 birthday?
January 17
Uncommon
Rarer than 70.4%of other birthday dates.
1 in 373births in this sample share your birthday.
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January 17 is the 258th most common birthday of the 366 dates in this collection, and the 109th rarest. It records 230,038 births out of 85,712,738, so roughly 1 in 373 people in this sample were born on it.
It is more common than 29.6% of the other 365 dates and rarer than 70.4%. It records 98.0% of an average day’s count in the sample.
January 17 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 January 17 marked.
January 17 against the days around it
| Date | Total births | Rank of 366 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| January 14 | 231,343 | #230 | |
| January 15 | 222,374 | #346 | |
| January 16 | 224,055 | #340 | |
| January 17 (this date) | 230,038 | #258 | |
| January 18 | 229,465 | #279 | |
| January 19 | 225,387 | #330 | |
| January 20 | 228,138 | #303 |
January as a whole records 10,721 births per day, ranked #12 of 12 months. Month ranking · January 16 · January 18
Has January 17 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 271.4 per 100,000; over the last five, 271.2 per 100,000 (-0.1%).
January 17 as a share of each year’s U.S. births, 1994–2014
Births on January 17 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 | 10,567 | 267.3 | |
| 1995 | 11,345 | 290.9 | |
| 1996 | 11,148 | 286.5 | |
| 1997 | 11,321 | 291.7 | |
| 1998 | 8,698 | 220.7 | |
| 1999 | 7,679 | 193.9 | |
| 2000 | 10,824 | 260.8 | |
| 2001 | 12,344 | 300.3 | |
| 2002 | 12,412 | 302.8 | |
| 2003 | 12,110 | 290.9 | |
| 2004 | 8,442 | 201.6 | |
| 2005 | 11,059 | 262.6 | |
| 2006 | 13,018 | 300.3 | |
| 2007 | 13,244 | 302.3 | |
| 2008 | 13,332 | 309.3 | |
| 2009 | 8,175 | 195.1 | |
| 2010 | 7,131 | 175.8 | |
| 2011 | 10,969 | 273.8 | |
| 2012 | 12,175 | 304.3 | |
| 2013 | 12,113 | 304.9 | |
| 2014 | 11,932 | 297.5 |
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, January 17 ranked #308 of 366 with 9,309 births per occurrence. The 1969–1988 calendar and what changed since.
January 17 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 | #217 | 98.8 | |
| England & Wales | #249 | 98.7 | |
| Denmark | #228 | 98.4 | |
| Metropolitan France | #168 | 100.4 | |
| Malaysia | #359 | 91.6 |
In the matched window the U.S. rank is #217; over the full 1994–2014 collection it is #258. 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, 15,444 have this birthday, one resident in 390. A count of people living there, wherever they were born. How many people in Denmark share a birthday.
Born on January 17
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.
- Kipchoge Keino1940Kenyan athlete
- Susanna Hoffs1959American musician
- Chili Davis1960Jamaican-American baseball player
- Denis O'Hare1962American actor
- Jim Carrey1962Canadian and American actor
- Kai Hansen1963German guitarist and singer
- Sylvain Turgeon1965Canadian ice hockey player
- Shabba Ranks1966Jamaican dancehall musician
- Richard Hawley1967English musician
- Maksim Chmerkovskiy1980Ukrainian-American dancer
- Zooey Deschanel1980American actress and singer
- Dwyane Wade1982American basketball player
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.
Keep going
- ← January 16
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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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