Most Popular Pet Names

Most popular dog names in the US

These come from American Kennel Club registration data for 2025, so they track dogs people registered, not entries in a click-in survey. Luna leads the female side, Max the male.

Most popular cat names in the US

Cat registries are thinner, so US cat rankings lean on pet-service surveys. The consistent leaders in 2025 are Luna, Milo, Leo, Oliver, and Bella, with Luna the same number one it holds for dogs. Food names are climbing fast underneath the top tier, with Mochi, Bean, and Tofu all inside the wider top 100.

Europe: the UK, Switzerland, and Germany

Britain keeps clean counts too. Kennel Club figures for 2024 put Luna first among new puppies with 1,753 registrations, then Bella at 1,492, Milo at 1,352, and Teddy at 1,067. The gaps are small at the top, but the order is the same one the US shows.

Europe is where the open data gets good. Switzerland runs Amicus, a national dog register managed by Identitas that holds more than 550,000 dogs. Luna is the most common female dog name in every language region, German, French, and Italian speaking alike, followed by Kira and Bella. Male names vary more by region, with Rocky common in the German-speaking areas.

Germany's TASSO registry, one of Europe's largest, published its 2024 counts with a clear headline: Luna has led female dogs for more than ten years running, ahead of Nala and Bella. On the male side Milo finally unseated Balu, which had held first place for nine years, with Charly, Buddy, and Bruno behind. For cats, Luna leads the females and Simba the males, the sixth year in a row Simba has topped that list.

Japan runs on a different list

Japan breaks the pattern completely. The pet insurer Anicom, drawing on well over 100,000 insured animals, has found Mugi, the word for barley or wheat, at number one for both dogs and cats for several years running, a rare case of one name leading both lists at once. The names around it are food and drink, Kinako, roasted soybean flour, Marron for chestnut, Omochi for rice cake, and Kohaku for amber. Where the West reaches for Luna and Max, Japan reaches for the pantry.

France names dogs by the year's letter

France runs the strangest system of all, and it is a matter of rule, not fashion. Since 1926 the Societe Centrale Canine has tied every pedigree litter to a starting letter set by its birth year, recorded in the national stud book, the LOF. A pedigree dog born in 2024 gets a name beginning with V; one born in 2025 starts with A. The purpose is practical, so a vet or a show judge can read a dog's rough age straight off its name. The cycle runs through twenty letters, skipping the awkward ones like K, Q, W, X, and Y, and comes back around every twenty years. Pedigree cats follow the same idea in their own register. So a French breeder does not chase a most popular name, but a most popular name that fits this year's letter, and the whole starting sound resets every January.

The one name the world agrees on

Put the number-one names side by side and one jumps out. Luna is the top female dog name in the US, the UK, Switzerland, and Germany at the same time, and the top cat name in the US and Germany too. Four countries, four separate registries, one name. Japan is the lone holdout.

The convergence is not a coincidence. Luna means moon in Latin, reads cleanly in English, German, Italian, and Spanish, and rides the same celestial-name wave everywhere streaming reaches. Japan sits outside that media loop for pet names and keeps its own food-based tradition, which is why one column of this table refuses to say Luna.

The male column tells the opposite story. No single name sweeps it: Max leads the US, Milo Germany and Britain, Rocky Switzerland. Female names converge on Luna while male names stay stubbornly national, a small puzzle worth noticing when a listicle claims one global favorite.

Which way the trends point

Registries that publish year after year show direction, not just a snapshot.

• Luna, still rising. More than a decade at number one for German female dogs, and now number one across the US and Switzerland too. It has not peaked yet.
• Balu, falling. After nine straight years leading German male dogs, Balu dropped to second in 2024 as Milo overtook it.
• Simba, steady. Six years running at the top of German male cats, held up by The Lion King, not any new trend.
• Bella, a long reign. Bella topped New York City dog licenses for years, with 1,358 registered in 2016 against Max's 1,268, before Luna caught the wider wave.
• Food names, climbing. Mochi, Oreo, and Mango are rising in US cat charts, the same food-name instinct that already rules Japan.

How we compiled this

Every ranking here is tied to a named, checkable source and a year, not a vague house data set. The US dog list is AKC registration data for 2025. Switzerland is the Amicus register run by Identitas, whose figures are downloadable. Germany is the TASSO registry's 2024 release. Japan is Anicom's insurance survey. The New York City counts come from NYC Open Data. Where only a top group is confirmed instead of a full ordered ten, we say so and stop there.

The distinction is worth drawing. The popularity you see elsewhere is usually one brand survey with no published counts. Our own name tool leans the other way. The popularity badges in the pet name generator are built from open registries, the Zurich dog-name data released under a public licence and New York City's licensing records, so a name marked popular is popular in data you can open yourself. One more sign the charts travel: of the 18 names that lead these national charts, 16 already sit in our own curated pool. The only two missing are the most local of all, Kira in Switzerland and Mugi in Japan.