Payne
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Hombre del campo
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Payne is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 1.6K(inferred from the name graph)
- NZNew Zealand≈1 in 1.8K
- AUAustralia≈1 in 1.9K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- #588 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 537 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 1.6K (inferred from the name graph)
142,601 people, 2010
of 19M surnames
Highest-authority source
United Kingdom, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
Hombre del campo
Sources 1
- 25,000 nombres de bebé. La mejor guía para escoger el nombre adecuado
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Payne counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
Sorted by bearers: national registers' counts, and Mondonomo's estimates (≈, est.) where no register counts.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | #160 | 142,601 | 1 in 2.3K | 143K | Payne | 537 |
| GB United Kingdom | #120 | ≈40,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.6K | 50K | Payne | 303 |
| EG Egypt | — | ≈19,000 est. | ≈1 in 5.6K | — | Payne | 20 |
| CA Canada | #170 | ≈16,000 est. | ≈1 in 2.4K | — | Payne | 229 |
| IT Italy | #306 | ≈13,000 est. | ≈1 in 4.7K | — | Payne | 45 |
| AU Australia | #155 | ≈13,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.9K | 1 | Payne | 229 |
| LA Laos | — | ≈4,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.9K | — | Payne | 7 |
| NZ New Zealand | #134 | ≈2,800 est. | ≈1 in 1.8K | — | Payne | 127 |
| GY Guyana | — | 457 | 1 in 1.6K | 457 | — | 8 |
142,601 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010. Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.
Registers cited: Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register); SA BDM — Popular baby names South Australia (1944–present); Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025. Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).
Other recorded senses(measured from records)
Payne is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Irish, The antiquity of this English name in Ireland is evident from its frequency in the fourteenth-century records and from the fact that the Tudor Fiants mention no less than six places called Payneston in five Leinster counties and in Tipperary. In later times it has been mainly found in Dublin. See Pyne
as a nameThe Surnames of Ireland
Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.
Notable people with this name(measured from records)
- Dolley Madisonb. 1768USnot in their usual nameFirst Lady of the United States from 1809 to 1817
- Cecilia Helena Payne Gaposchkinb. 1900USBritish-born American astronomer
- John Payneb. 1912USAmerican actor (1912–1989)
- Tress MacNeilleb. 1951USnot in their usual nameAmerican voice actress
- Marita Payneb. 1960CACanadian track and field athlete
- Alexander Payneb. 1961USAmerican film director, producer and screenwriter (born 1961)
- Marise Payneb. 1964AUAustralian politician
- Dan Payneb. 1972CACanadian actor
- Tom Payneb. 1982GBEnglish actor; (born 1982)
- Liam Payneb. 1993GBEnglish singer and songwriter (1993–2024)
The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 51 sources across 31 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 143K | #195 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 138K | #183 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 137K | #205 |
| GB United Kingdom | Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register) | 2002 | 50K | #114 |
| GY Guyana | Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025 | 2025 | 457 | #248 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 5
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- jeantosti.com — Dictionnaire des noms de famille de France et d'ailleurs (Jean Tosti)
These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Payne mean, and where does it come from?
- Hombre del campo Recorded by 25,000 nombres de bebé. La mejor guía para escoger el nombre adecuado.
- In which country does Payne have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 143 thousand people named Payne, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled payne.
- How common is the name Payne?
- In the United States, the national register counted 142,601 people named Payne in 2010, about 1 in 2.3 thousand residents.
- How common is Payne compared with other names?
- In the United States, Payne is the 160th most common surname of 6,282,806 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Payne?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/payneThe payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.
About this data
measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated
These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.
Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.
Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.
Cite this page Mondonomo, “Payne” — the 160th most common surname in United States. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.