Rivera
surname · Latin script
Meaning, in Spanish: stream
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/riβeɾa/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Rivera is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. In Honduras it is the 8th most common surname.
- SVEl Salvador≈1 in 80(inferred from the name graph)
- HNHonduras≈1 in 96
- NINicaragua≈1 in 130
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)
- #163 (measured from records)
- 5 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 542 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 26 (inferred from the name graph)
391,114 people, 2010
of 19M surnames
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Puerto Rico, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records, and ○ marks a model's transliteration; click a spelling to open its page.
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
person from Rivera; place-name meaning “place on the banks of a river”
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
How Rivera is read(measured from records)
Rivera is one spelling over 2 language communities, and the dictionaries record it differently in 2 of them. Each row is what a source recorded for that language, beside the share of this name’s records the language holds. No single row is the name’s meaning.
- Spanish58%
stream
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Ciudad de Mexico, Livorno, Newport, New York; ribeirinho; riverain
as a nameDicionario Sefaradi De SobrenomesDictionary Of Sephardic Surnames Inclusive Cristaos-Novos, Conversos, Marranos, Italianos,…
- English26%
person from Rivera; place-name meaning “place on the banks of a river”
as a nameEncyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Chita, US actress, singer; Geraldo,
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
US TV interviewer
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
The share is ours — how much of this name’s records each language holds. The sense beside it is the source’s, quoted and credited, including where it names a gender. We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Rivera 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 | #111 | 391,114 | 1 in 850 | 398K | Rivera | 542 |
| PH Philippines | #46 | ≈210,000 est. | ≈1 in 522 | — | Rivera | 150 |
| CO Colombia | #32 | ≈160,000 est. | ≈1 in 299 | 82 | Rivera | 200 |
| PR Puerto Rico | #125 | ≈120,000 est. | ≈1 in 26 | — | Rivera | 142 |
| PE Peru | #30 | ≈110,000 est. | ≈1 in 281 | 240K | Rivera | 139 |
| HN Honduras | #8 | ≈96,000 est. | ≈1 in 96 | — | Rivera | 103 |
| SV El Salvador | #11 | ≈81,000 est. | ≈1 in 80 | 87K | Rivera | 103 |
| NI Nicaragua | #9 | ≈48,000 est. | ≈1 in 130 | — | Rivera | 73 |
| CR Costa Rica | — | 37,654 | 1 in 135 | 38K | — | 127 |
391,114 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; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; the pe-reniec-name-freq register; El Salvador top-100 surnames (surnam.es / RNPN-derived); the co-datosgov-candidates register; TSE — electoral roll (padrón) names. 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)
Rivera 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 Italian, variante regional de Riviera
as a nameDicionário dos sobrenomes italianos
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)
- Fructuoso Riverab. 1784UYpresident of Uruguay (1784-1854)
- Diego Riverab. 1886MXMexican muralist (1886–1957)
- Gianni Riverab. 1943ITItalian footballer and politician
- Geraldo Riverab. 1943USAmerican attorney, journalist and talk show host
- Luis Guillermo Solísb. 1958CRnot in their usual nameCosta Rican 47th president
- Emilio Riverab. 1961USAmerican actor (born 1961)
- Don Omarb. 1978USnot in their usual namePuerto Rican rapper and actor (born 1978)
- Naya Riverab. 1987USAmerican actress and singer (1987–2020)
- Zuleyka Rivera Mendozab. 1987USPuerto Rican model actor
- Danna Paolab. 1995MXnot in their usual nameMexican singer, actress, composer and model
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).
How to address them(machine-generated)
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 56 sources across 32 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 398K | #46 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 391K | #46 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 299K | #59 |
| PE Peru | RENIEC — Apellidos más frecuentes (national DNI bearer counts, 2025) | 2025 | 240K | #35 |
| SV El Salvador | El Salvador top-100 surnames (surnam.es / RNPN-derived) | — | 87K | #11 |
| CR Costa Rica | TSE — electoral roll (padrón) names | — | 38K | #58 |
| CO Colombia | Colombia — Función Pública SIGEP II public-servant name corpus (datos.gov.co) | — | 82 | #38 |
| CR Costa Rica | TSE — Consulta de nombres (Padrón Nacional Electoral name enumeration) | — | — | — |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 7
- 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)
- Rymut, Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (10 vols, IJP PAN, Kraków 1992–1994) — every Polish surname in the PESEL register at the end of 1990, with bearer counts nationally and per voivodeship1990
- jeantosti.com — Dictionnaire des noms de famille de France et d'ailleurs (Jean Tosti)
- Cognomix.it (Nomix s.r.l.) — Italian surname origin dictionary
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 Rivera mean?
- In Spanish, stream
- Where does the name Rivera come from?
- person from Rivera; place-name meaning “place on the banks of a river” Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Rivera?
- A machine transcription gives /riβeɾa/ (IPA) for Spanish.
- In which country does Rivera have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 391 thousand people named Rivera, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled rivera.
- How common is the name Rivera?
- In the United States, the national register counted 391,114 people named Rivera in 2010, about 1 in 850 residents.
- How common is Rivera compared with other names?
- In the United States, Rivera is the 111th most common surname of 6,282,806 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Rivera?
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/riveraThe 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, “Rivera” — the 111th most common surname in United States. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.