Surname statistics for Wales

There are approximately 5,379 people named Wales in the UK. That makes it the 1,954th most common surname overall. Out of every million people in the UK, approximately 85 are named Wales.

Frequency Comparisons
TotalRankFrequency %Per million people
Great Britain
United Kingdom (current)53791954N/A85
United Kingdom (1881 census)242618400.00881
Change since 1881+2953-114+0.001+4
Other Countries
United States49836295N/A18
Australia10211624N/A62

Politics

People with the surname Wales 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 Labour.

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

  1. Labour (1)
  2. Liberal Democrat (1)
More stats for the politics nerds!

Top male forenames

John Wales
David Wales
Stephen Wales
Andrew Wales
Paul Wales
Peter Wales
William Wales
Michael Wales
Robert Wales
Steven Wales
Colin Wales
Richard Wales
Ian Wales
Jonathan Wales
Gary Wales
Simon Wales
Brian Wales
Philip Wales
Nicholas Wales
Raymond Wales

Top female forenames

Gillian Wales
Sarah Wales
Joanne Wales
Susan Wales
Christine Wales
Julie Wales
Pamela Wales
Helen Wales
Michelle Wales
Margaret Wales
Pauline Wales
Anne Wales
Victoria Wales
Shirley Wales
Sandra Wales
Ann Wales
Lesley Wales
Linda Wales
Lorna Wales
Lorraine Wales

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.