Surname statistics for White

There are approximately 195,229 people named White in the UK. That makes it the 17th most common surname overall. Out of every million people in the UK, approximately 3,090 are named White.

Frequency Comparisons
TotalRankFrequency %Per million people
Great Britain
United Kingdom (current)19522917N/A3090
United Kingdom (1881 census)96263130.3213214
Change since 1881+98966-4-0.012-124
Other Countries
United States63951520N/A2371
Australia310998N/A1902

Politics

People with the surname White 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 Conservative.

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

  1. Conservative (24)
  2. Labour (15)
  3. Liberal Democrat (7)
  4. Independent (3)
  5. SNP (1)
  6. Green (1)
  7. Alderman (1)
More stats for the politics nerds!

Top male forenames

David White
John White
Paul White
Andrew White
Peter White
Michael White
Richard White
Christopher White
Stephen White
Robert White
Ian White
James White
Mark White
Anthony White
Alan White
Graham White
Simon White
William White
Jonathan White
Nicholas White

Top female forenames

Susan White
Sarah White
Elizabeth White
Helen White
Margaret White
Patricia White
Julie White
Jane White
Janet White
Christine White
Carol White
Linda White
Mary White
Karen White
Alison White
Jacqueline White
Nicola White
Angela White
Sandra White
Jennifer White

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.