Surname statistics for King

There are approximately 148,925 people named King in the UK. That makes it the 36th most common surname overall. Out of every million people in the UK, approximately 2,357 are named King.

Frequency Comparisons
TotalRankFrequency %Per million people
Great Britain
United Kingdom (current)14892536N/A2357
United Kingdom (1881 census)65268370.2182179
Change since 1881+83657+1+0.018+178
Other Countries
United States43898635N/A1627
Australia2487020N/A1521

Politics

People with the surname King are 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 King are:

  1. Conservative (11)
  2. Labour (11)
  3. Independent (5)
  4. Liberal Democrat (2)
  5. SNP (1)
  6. Canvey Island Independents (1)
More stats for the politics nerds!

Top male forenames

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

Top female forenames

Susan King
Sarah King
Elizabeth King
Christine King
Julie King
Deborah King
Jane King
Patricia King
Karen King
Mary King
Margaret King
Carol King
Linda King
Helen King
Jennifer King
Alison King
Nicola King
Anne King
Amanda King
Barbara King

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.