February in the birth records
February accounts for 4,725,693 births, or 7.60% of the 62,187,024 records in the SSA 2000–2014 sample. Within this month, February 14 is the most common date, ranked #48 nationally. February 29 has the fewest total records and ranks #366. The table above includes all 29 dates, not just those two extremes.
What makes this month worth a closer look
February has two different reasons to inspect the fine print. It has fewer days than the other months, and February 29 exists only in leap years. A small monthly total does not automatically mean that every ordinary February date is rare. The per-date table avoids that confusion by comparing each birthday with the same 366-date calendar.
Leap day occurred four times in this fifteen-year sample. Its headline rank includes that lower frequency, while the births-per-occurrence column divides its count by four. Those are different questions with different answers. February 14 also offers a useful comparison with its neighbors; the counts alone cannot tell us whether the date’s cultural meaning influenced any particular delivery.
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.