AKC released its 2025 dog-name list yesterday. Max retook the boys' top spot from Milo, which had held it for two years. Bella is still first for girls. The headline that the AKC release is generating is the Hank jump — Hank moved from position 35 in 2024 to position 2 in 2025, the largest single-year move in AKC's tracking history. Most coverage is treating this as a surprise. I want to argue that it is not a surprise at all, and that the reason Hank moved is sitting in SSA data from 2018, where it has been waiting for seven years for someone to read it correctly.
The six-year baby-to-pet lag
I've been tracking the relationship between SSA baby-name data and AKC and municipal pet-licensing data for several years, and the pattern that keeps showing up is consistent enough that I'd argue it functions as a near-rule. Pet names lag baby names by about six to seven years, in the same direction, and then they overshoot. Cooper went from outside the boys' top 200 in 2010 to top 80 in 2014, and Cooper as a dog name moved into the AKC top 30 by 2020. Charlie did the same thing on the same time signature. Bella, despite being one of the most stable dog names of the modern era, was a baby-naming phenomenon a decade before it was a dog-name phenomenon.
The mechanism is, I think, unsentimental. Parents pick names for their children that they associate with current good taste. Six or seven years later, when those parents are getting their first family dog, they pick names from the same aesthetic register, but they shift slightly toward names they considered for the baby and didn't pick. The dog gets the second-favorite baby name, which means the dog gets the name that was on the rise during the parent's pregnancy but didn't quite make it onto the birth certificate. The lag is the lag between picking the baby name and being ready to add a pet to the household.
Hank in SSA data, 2014 to 2024
Hank's SSA trajectory is the kind of trajectory you can predict a pet boom from. The name was outside the top 1000 for years, made a quiet first appearance in 2014, and began climbing about 50 places per year between 2017 and 2022. By 2022 it was inside the top 500. By 2024 it was at position 410. The climb was not driven by any single cultural event — it was driven by the broader Americana-name revival that put Wyatt, Hudson, Beau, Boone, and other short, hard-edged American names back into upper-middle-class consideration during the 2010s. Hank rode that wave alongside its register-mates.
Six to seven years after Hank started its SSA climb is now. The 2018 SSA Hank babies are the parents — well, not the parents, the children of those parents are now the seven-year-old kids who get a dog when their parents finally agree it's time. The 2018 SSA Hank parents are now the parents in their late thirties and early forties picking the family dog. The aesthetic register they're drawing on is the same one they drew on for the kid's name, which means Hank — the name they liked but didn't pick for the baby — is suddenly available for the dog.
What AKC's data is actually measuring
AKC's data, importantly, is registered-purebred-dog data. It's not all dogs. Mixed-breed and shelter dogs do not appear in AKC's count, which means AKC over-represents the demographic of households that buy purebred dogs from breeders or specialty rescues. That demographic is, on average, more affluent than the dog-owning population at large. The Hank jump in AKC data is therefore a slightly skewed signal — it shows movement in the upper-bracket pet-naming demographic specifically.
Municipal data is broader and tells a slightly different story. NYC's dog-licensing data, which I work with regularly, also shows Hank rising — from outside the top 100 in 2020 to roughly position 60 in 2024 — but the rise is gentler than the AKC data suggests, and the absolute rank is lower. Seattle's pet-licensing data shows a similar pattern. The combined picture is that Hank is rising in dog-naming, the rise is real, but the AKC jump is partly an artifact of demographic concentration. The 33-place AKC jump is dramatic; the underlying cultural movement is real but quieter.
What the lag predicts for 2030
If the six-year lag holds, the dog names that will dominate AKC's 2030 list are sitting in 2024 SSA baby data right now, and they are mostly identifiable. The names I'd watch are the ones that are climbing fast in 2024 baby data and that have the structural properties — short, masculine-coded, hard-edged consonants, vintage feel — that produce the strongest pet-name cross-over. My current top candidates are Knox, Wells, Beck, Cash, Atlas, and possibly Brooks, all of which have been climbing in baby data over the last three years.
For girls' dog names, the same logic but with the typical girls'-naming aesthetic register suggests Wren, June, Sage, Maeve, and possibly Posey as the names most likely to break into AKC's top 30 by 2030. Posey is interesting because it's still rare in baby data — it's at roughly 850 in girls — but it has the right phonetic profile (two syllables, ends in a soft vowel, vintage feel) and it has been quietly climbing.
The Cooper exception and what it teaches
Not every fast-climbing baby name produces a pet boom. Cooper did. Charlie did. But several other 2010s baby-name climbers did not produce proportional pet-name booms. Atticus, despite being one of the most-talked-about fast climbers in 2010s baby data, has produced almost no AKC movement. The same with Soren, Caspian, and Roscoe. The pattern that distinguishes pet-friendly from pet-hostile baby names is, I think, fairly clear: pet names need to be short, easily yelled across a park, and not too literarily loaded. Atticus fails the literary test — it's too tagged to a specific book character to function as a dog name, and parents who like Atticus enough to pick it for their kid don't want to dilute the reference by giving it to the dog.
Hank passes all three tests. Short. Easy to yell. Not literarily loaded — it has Americana associations but no specific character lock-in. The pet-name pipeline favors names like Hank specifically because the names that perform well as dog names are not always the names that perform well as ratifiable elite baby names. The intersection — names that are both rising in baby data and meet the pet-name structural criteria — is where AKC's surprise jumps come from.
What I'd argue AKC's 2025 list is really telling us
The list is telling us that the baby-naming aesthetic of the late 2010s is now the family-pet aesthetic of the mid-2020s, and that the lag has been remarkably consistent. The list is also telling us that the next wave of pet-name climbers is identifiable now, in 2024 SSA data, and that anyone who wants to predict 2030 AKC movement just needs to read 2024 baby-data trends carefully. The cultural mechanism is more durable than most naming mechanisms because it depends on a household-formation cycle (kids get old enough to want a pet) that is itself relatively stable.
The boring qualifier, as always, is that any specific prediction can fail. Knox might not produce a 2031 AKC boom; Posey might not break into the top 30. But the structural pattern — six-year lag, baby-name aesthetic predicts pet-name aesthetic, AKC over-represents the upper-bracket demographic — should continue to hold. The 2025 Hank jump is the latest data point in a long sequence, and the sequence is one of the more reliable patterns I track.
If you were planning to be surprised by AKC's 2031 list, you don't have to be. The list is being printed right now, in baby names, in SSA data that has already been released and is sitting in the public file waiting to be read.
Data source: NYC Dog Licensing Dataset + Seattle Pet Licenses. Analysis by NamesPop.
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