Surname statistics for McDonald

There are approximately 52,276 people named McDonald in the UK. That makes it the 148th most common surname overall. Out of every million people in the UK, approximately 827 are named McDonald.

Frequency Comparisons
TotalRankFrequency %Per million people
Great Britain
United Kingdom (current)52276148N/A827
United Kingdom (1881 census)243218340.00881
Change since 1881+49844+1686+0.075+746
Other Countries
United States176094127N/A653
Australia2099939N/A1285

Politics

People with the surname McDonald are slightly less likely to be politicians than the average member of the population. When they do become politicians, they are most likely to be elected as Labour.

As of the most recent set of elections, the political parties represented by politicians called McDonald are:

  1. Labour (10)
  2. SNP (5)
  3. Conservative (1)
More stats for the politics nerds!

Top male forenames

John McDonald
David McDonald
Ian McDonald
James McDonald
Andrew McDonald
Michael McDonald
Paul McDonald
Robert McDonald
Peter McDonald
William McDonald
Stephen McDonald
Brian McDonald
Neil McDonald
Anthony McDonald
Gary McDonald
Thomas McDonald
Scott McDonald
Mark McDonald
Alan McDonald
Colin McDonald

Top female forenames

Susan McDonald
Margaret McDonald
Elizabeth McDonald
Linda McDonald
Fiona McDonald
Helen McDonald
Sarah McDonald
Sharon McDonald
Patricia McDonald
Catherine McDonald
Jacqueline McDonald
Angela McDonald
Karen McDonald
Nicola McDonald
Louise McDonald
Ann McDonald
Pauline McDonald
Janet McDonald
Anne McDonald
Mary McDonald

Notes

  • Total is the total number of people with that surname.
  • Rank is the position in the list of names ordered by total (eg, a rank of 1 means that it's the most common name, and a rank of 10 means it's the tenth most common, etc).
  • Frequency is the percentage of people with that surname.
  • Per million people is the number of people with that surname per million of the population.

All of these are approximate figures, and the current figures especially so. The 1881 census figures are correct for what was recorded on the census, but we don't really know how accurate it was. At least, though the 1881 figures won't change, as it's a snapshot of a point in time. The current figures, by contrast, are variable according to births, deaths, migration and marriages, so the values shown here are only a best approximation to whatever was the case when the underlying data was collated and will not be the same as whatever the values are right now.

'N/A' indicates that we don't have data for this name in that country or time (usually because it's quite uncommon there and our stats don't go down that far). It doesn't mean that there's no-one there with that name at all!

For less common surnames, the figures get progressively less reliable the fewer holders of that name there are. This data is aggregated from several public lists, and some stats are interpolated from known values. The margin of error is well over 100% at the rarest end of the table!

It's possible for a surname to gain in rank and/or total while being less common per million people (or vice versa) as there are now more surnames in the UK as a result of immigration. In mathematical terms, the tail has got longer, with a far larger number of less common surnames.