๐ How Rare Are You in the USA?
๐บ๐ธ Genetic Landscape of USA
The United States is one of the most genetically diverse nations on Earth, shaped by centuries of immigration from every continent. European, African, Indigenous, Asian, and Latin American ancestry intermingle to create a population where no single phenotype dominates. The Midwest shows heavy Northern European influence (Scandinavian, German), while the South reflects African American heritage blending West African and European lineages. The Southwest carries strong Indigenous and Spanish colonial markers. This diversity means that almost any combination of traits can be found somewhere in America, making true uniqueness harder to achieve than in more homogeneous nations.
Averages across a country this size hide more than they reveal. Distinct old communities sit inside the national picture, each with its own history and its own stock of names: Gullah speakers on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia, Cajun families in the Louisiana parishes that absorbed Acadians expelled from Canada, Amish and Old Order Mennonite households still speaking a German dialect across Pennsylvania and Ohio, and Spanish-surnamed villages in northern New Mexico whose founders arrived a generation before the Pilgrims landed. Hawaii, Alaska and the Navajo Nation add whole populations that national percentages round away. Gullah, for one, is a creole language rather than an accent, and linguists have traced many of its personal names back to West African originals.
๐ Every Surname That Turned Up 100 Times
The Census Bureau publishes a national file of surnames from the 2010 Census: every name reported 100 or more times, with its rank, its count, its proportion per 100,000 people, and percentage columns for six race and Hispanic-origin categories, from “Percent Non-Hispanic White Alone” to “Percent Hispanic or Latino origin”. The file is aggregated at national level only, and percentages are suppressed where necessary for confidentiality.
That floor of 100 is the part that matters for rarity. A surname carried by fifty people is not rare in the file; it is missing from it, with no count to look up. These lists get used: in a 2014 methodology paper the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau set out how it combines a census surname list with census geography to estimate the race and ethnicity of applicants for non-mortgage credit, because auto lenders and other non-mortgage lenders are generally not allowed to collect that information. That paper worked from the older list built on Census 2000, which used the same floor of 100. Those percentages describe the people who reported a name, never the person holding it. Given names are counted separately — see how rare is my name.
๐๏ธ Eye Color
| Brown | 45% |
| Blue | 27% |
| Hazel | 18% |
| Green | 9% |
| Gray | 1% |
๐ Hair Color
| Brown | 33% |
| Black | 28% |
| Blonde | 23% |
| Red | 3% |
| Other | 13% |
๐ฉธ Blood Type
| O+ | 37% |
| A+ | 36% |
| B+ | 9% |
| O- | 7% |
| A- | 6% |
| AB+ | 3% |
| B- | 1% |
| AB- | 1% |
Trait frequencies on this page come from public and institutional datasets โ see Data Sources.
🧮 Calculate Your Rarity in the USA
Pick your eye colour, hair colour and blood type. The calculator uses the USA's own figures from the tables above, not world averages.
This is an estimate, not a measurement. It multiplies three national frequencies as if they were independent, and they are not: eye and hair colour share pigmentation genes, so a combination that tends to run together, such as blue eyes with blonde hair, is more common than the multiplication suggests, while one that rarely does, such as blue eyes with black hair, is rarer. Blood type is independent of both. The frequencies are national averages from public datasets — see Data Sources.
That number describes the body you were born with. Fraeon, our other site, does the same arithmetic for the part you chose: the films, series, games, books, anime and manga you have actually finished. Start your log →
๐ฅ The Hole Where 1890 Should Be
American personal records have a dated gap. At about five in the afternoon on 10 January 1921 smoke was noticed in the basement of the Commerce Building in Washington, where the 1890 census population schedules were stacked outside the vault. The next morning Census Director Sam Rogers reported an estimated 25 per cent of them destroyed, with 50 per cent of the remainder damaged by water, smoke and fire. Congress authorised destruction of what was left on 21 February 1933.
The other shape in the record is a moving wall. Individual census returns stay sealed for 72 years under a statutory restriction (92 Stat. 915; Public Law 95-416; October 5, 1978), which is why the 1950 census was only released digitally on 1 April 2022. So an American following a family through the census has no 1890 at all, and nothing later than 1950 until the 1960 returns come out of the seal. Some numbers exist and others do not because of a fire and a statute.
๐๏ธ The Boxes Themselves Changed in 2024
On 28 March 2024 the Office of Management and Budget published a revised Statistical Policy Directive No. 15, the rulebook for how federal statistics classify race and ethnicity. Two things changed. Race and ethnicity became a single combined question, on which a respondent may report one category or several. And a Middle Eastern or North African category was added; under the 1997 version of the standard, MENA respondents were defined and tabulated within the White category.
It is worth holding that next to any percentage on this page. Nobody moved and nobody changed: a definition was rewritten, and people whose answers once landed in one column now have a category of their own. Categories in a national statistic are decisions taken by a named office on a datable day, and they get revised. That is also why the tables here are estimates rather than measurements, and why we list what each figure rests on — see Data Sources.
โญ Rare Facts About USA
Which institution stands behind which number here
The four tiles above have four different sources. Population comes from the United States Census Bureau, which runs the decennial census and the population estimates built on it. Height comes from the National Center for Health Statistics, which measures a sample rather than everyone: its reference for August 2021–August 2023 gives 68.9 inches (175.0 cm) for men 20 and over. That is not the 177 cm in the tile above, and we could not source that number. The blood-type percentages trace to the AABB Technical Manual, 18th edition, published as general estimations for educational purposes only. The eye figure in the tile, and the hair figures in the tables below, have no institutional source; they are estimates from non-official samples. Last checked September 2026.