Olivia and Noah top New Mexico baby name list for 2025

The New Mexico Department of Health released the state's most popular baby names for 2025, with Olivia the top choice for girls and Noah leading the boys. The full top 10 lists reflect ongoing naming patterns that have implications for McKinley County's health systems, schools and community services.

For girls the top 10 names were listed as: 1 Olivia, 2 Mia, 3 Sophia, 4 Sofia, 5 Camila, 6 Eliana, 7 Amelia, 8 Isabella, 9 Aurora, 10 Aria. For boys the top 10 were: 1 Noah, 2 Liam, 3 Mateo, 4 Elijah, 5 Santiago, 6 Sebastian, 7 Ezra, 8 Elias, 9 Levi, 10 Ezekiel. The boys' top-10 matched the previous year, and Aria returned to the girls' top-10 after a one-year absence.

At first glance a baby-name list may seem like light culture reporting, but for public health and local service providers the data matters. Birth registrations feed vital records, immunization tracking, Medicaid enrollment and early childhood program rosters. Repeated popular names increase the chance of duplicate entries in electronic medical records, school enrollment lists and benefit systems, raising the need for careful identifiers such as birth date and parent names when clinicians and clerks register newborns.

The composition of the lists also reflects McKinley County's cultural landscape. Names like Camila, Mateo and Santiago point to Hispanic naming traditions, while the growth and return of other names speak to shifting preferences among families across the county's communities. For public health outreach that means bilingual materials, culturally competent messaging and staff who can verify spellings and pronunciation at registration to honor family identity and avoid errors in medical records.

Community organizations and clinics that run nurse home visits, WIC appointments and well-baby clinics can use the naming trends to anticipate demand for newborn services and outreach work. Stable popularity at the top of the boys' list suggests predictable cohort sizes for early childhood programs; changes on the girls' list — such as Aria's return — are the sort of small shifts that can signal broader cultural or media influences worth monitoring.

From a policy perspective, accurate vital records are an equity issue. Ensuring staff are trained to capture unique names correctly, accommodate diacritics or spelling variants when possible, and to provide language access can reduce barriers families face when enrolling in health coverage or school programs. Those administrative details matter most for low-income households and tribal communities for whom paperwork errors can delay services.

The takeaway? Keep it simple at the clinic and at home: double-check spellings and dates when registering a newborn, and for community organizations make sure intake forms and outreach are ready in Spanish and other local languages. Our two cents? A name is part of a child's identity — treating it carefully in our systems makes life easier for families and helps local health and social services run smoother.