August in the birth records
August accounts for 5,540,170 births, or 8.91% of the 62,187,024 records in the SSA 2000–2014 sample. Within this month, August 8 is the most common date, ranked #8 nationally. August 3 has the fewest total records and ranks #129. The table above includes all 31 dates, not just those two extremes.
What makes this month worth a closer look
August has 31 rows, each based on fifteen occurrences. A large number of births in an entire month can reflect both the month’s length and its dates’ individual frequencies. This page keeps the unit of comparison fixed at one calendar birthday, so August 1 and August 31 receive the same kind of calculation.
For a seasonal comparison, follow the calendar into September, which contains several of this dataset’s highest-count dates. The change across that boundary is visible in the rows; it does not identify when any individual was conceived. Gestation lengths vary, and these files have no conception records. Birthday frequency is the question the dataset can actually answer.
Read your row and make a card
Rank #1 is most common across all 366 dates. “1 in” divides all birth records by the records for that specific date; the daily-average column divides by the number of times the date occurred. A higher “rarer than” percentage means more other dates had higher counts. These are different ways of describing the same historical sample, not estimates of everyone alive today.
Select your date in the table to open the birthday calculator. Save a portrait or landscape result, or combine it with your name. The complete methodology and original FiveThirtyEight source stay available for anyone who wants to check the numbers.