Surname statistics for Kay

There are approximately 29,777 people named Kay in the UK. That makes it the 312nd most common surname overall. Out of every million people in the UK, approximately 471 are named Kay.

Frequency Comparisons
TotalRankFrequency %Per million people
Great Britain
United Kingdom (current)29777312N/A471
United Kingdom (1881 census)155592570.052520
Change since 1881+14218-55-0.005-49
Other Countries
United States231891402N/A86
Australia3450433N/A211

Politics

People with the surname Kay are slightly more 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 Kay are:

  1. Conservative (4)
  2. Labour (4)
  3. Independent (1)
  4. SNP (1)
  5. Green (1)
More stats for the politics nerds!

Top male forenames

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

Top female forenames

Susan Kay
Karen Kay
Sarah Kay
Angela Kay
Margaret Kay
Elizabeth Kay
Julie Kay
Alison Kay
Lisa Kay
Anne Kay
Mary Kay
Jacqueline Kay
Patricia Kay
Janet Kay
Barbara Kay
Louise Kay
Gillian Kay
Ruth Kay
Jennifer Kay
Deborah Kay

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.