Surname statistics for Brown

There are approximately 383,180 people named Brown in the UK. That makes it the 4th most common surname overall. Out of every million people in the UK, approximately 6,065 are named Brown.

Frequency Comparisons
TotalRankFrequency %Per million people
Great Britain
United Kingdom (current)383180416065
United Kingdom (1881 census)19741540.6596592
Change since 1881+1857650-0.053-527
Other Countries
United States1380145415116
Australia548964N/A3358

Politics

People with the surname Brown are slightly less likely to be politicians than the average member of the population. When they do become politicians, they are most likely to be elected as Conservative.

As of the most recent set of elections, the political parties represented by politicians called Brown are:

  1. Conservative (42)
  2. Labour (26)
  3. Liberal Democrat (17)
  4. SNP (9)
  5. Independent (7)
  6. UKIP (3)
  7. Socialist Labour (1)
  8. Independant Ratepayers & Residents Association (1)
  9. Merthyr Independent (1)
More stats for the politics nerds!

Top male forenames

David Brown
Andrew Brown
Michael Brown
John Brown
Robert Brown
James Brown
Stephen Brown
Paul Brown
Peter Brown
Christopher Brown
Richard Brown
Ian Brown
Alan Brown
Mark Brown
Anthony Brown
William Brown
Simon Brown
Martin Brown
Steven Brown
Colin Brown

Top female forenames

Susan Brown
Margaret Brown
Sarah Brown
Elizabeth Brown
Patricia Brown
Christine Brown
Julie Brown
Helen Brown
Linda Brown
Karen Brown
Jacqueline Brown
Jane Brown
Nicola Brown
Janet Brown
Jennifer Brown
Catherine Brown
Deborah Brown
Sandra Brown
Claire Brown
Mary Brown

Notes

  • Total is the total number of people with that surname.
  • Rank is the position in the list of names ordered by total (eg, a rank of 1 means that it's the most common name, and a rank of 10 means it's the tenth most common, etc).
  • Frequency is the percentage of people with that surname.
  • Per million people is the number of people with that surname per million of the population.

All of these are approximate figures, and the current figures especially so. The 1881 census figures are correct for what was recorded on the census, but we don't really know how accurate it was. At least, though the 1881 figures won't change, as it's a snapshot of a point in time. The current figures, by contrast, are variable according to births, deaths, migration and marriages, so the values shown here are only a best approximation to whatever was the case when the underlying data was collated and will not be the same as whatever the values are right now.

'N/A' indicates that we don't have data for this name in that country or time (usually because it's quite uncommon there and our stats don't go down that far). It doesn't mean that there's no-one there with that name at all!

For less common surnames, the figures get progressively less reliable the fewer holders of that name there are. This data is aggregated from several public lists, and some stats are interpolated from known values. The margin of error is well over 100% at the rarest end of the table!

It's possible for a surname to gain in rank and/or total while being less common per million people (or vice versa) as there are now more surnames in the UK as a result of immigration. In mathematical terms, the tail has got longer, with a far larger number of less common surnames.