How common is a May 20 birthday?
May 20
Common
More common than 58.9%of other birthday dates.
1 in 363births in this sample share your birthday.
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May 20 is the 151st most common birthday of the 366 dates in this collection, and the 216th rarest. It records 235,846 births out of 85,712,738, so roughly 1 in 363 people in this sample were born on it.
It is more common than 58.9% of the other 365 dates and rarer than 41.1%. It records 100.5% of an average day’s count in the sample.
May 20 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 May 20 marked.
May 20 against the days around it
| Date | Total births | Rank of 366 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| May 17 | 234,418 | #178 | |
| May 18 | 229,518 | #276 | |
| May 19 | 231,664 | #225 | |
| May 20 (this date) | 235,846 | #151 | |
| May 21 | 237,249 | #133 | |
| May 22 | 237,932 | #126 | |
| May 23 | 243,051 | #89 |
May as a whole records 11,022 births per day, ranked #6 of 12 months. Month ranking · May 19 · May 21
Has May 20 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 286.3 per 100,000; over the last five, 282.2 per 100,000 (-1.4%).
May 20 as a share of each year’s U.S. births, 1994–2014
Births on May 20 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 | 11,645 | 294.6 | |
| 1995 | 8,721 | 223.6 | |
| 1996 | 11,073 | 284.5 | |
| 1997 | 12,346 | 318.1 | |
| 1998 | 12,241 | 310.6 | |
| 1999 | 11,944 | 301.7 | |
| 2000 | 8,673 | 209.0 | |
| 2001 | 7,732 | 188.1 | |
| 2002 | 11,788 | 287.6 | |
| 2003 | 13,239 | 318.0 | |
| 2004 | 13,036 | 311.4 | |
| 2005 | 13,007 | 308.8 | |
| 2006 | 8,624 | 198.9 | |
| 2007 | 7,577 | 173.0 | |
| 2008 | 13,912 | 322.7 | |
| 2009 | 13,694 | 326.7 | |
| 2010 | 12,559 | 309.6 | |
| 2011 | 12,011 | 299.8 | |
| 2012 | 7,202 | 180.0 | |
| 2013 | 11,968 | 301.2 | |
| 2014 | 12,854 | 320.5 |
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, May 20 ranked #159 of 366 with 9,614 births per occurrence. The 1969–1988 calendar and what changed since.
May 20 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 | #133 | 101.8 | |
| England & Wales | #272 | 98.2 | |
| Denmark | #171 | 100.4 | |
| Metropolitan France | #215 | 99.4 | |
| Malaysia | #103 | 102.3 |
In the matched window the U.S. rank is #133; over the full 1994–2014 collection it is #151. 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, 17,258 have this birthday, one resident in 349. A count of people living there, wherever they were born. How many people in Denmark share a birthday.
Born on May 20
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.
- Albano Carrisi1943Italian recording artist; singer and actor
- Bobby Murcer1946–2008American baseball player and broadcaster
- Douglas Preston1956American journalist and author
- Tony Goldwyn1960American actor and director
- David Wells1963American baseball player
- Gabriele Muccino1967Italian film director
- Timothy Olyphant1968American actor
- Busta Rhymes1972American rapper
- Shiboprosad Mukherjee1974Indian filmmaker and screenwriter
- Angela Goethals1977American actress
- Rachel Platten1981American singer-songwriter
- N. T. Rama Rao Jr.1983Indian actor
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
- ← May 19
- May 21 →
- All May birthdays
- All 366 dates
- Most common birthday
- Least common 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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