Baby (Dermatique UK)

Happy 2016! I hope it’s off to a good start for everyone, and your resolutions are intact so far.

In the spirit of the season, I was curious to find out how common New Year’s Day births are. No more auspicious time for a baby to make its debut, right?

The United Kingdom’s Office for National Statistics kept records of popular birthdays from 1995 to 2014. As you can see below, New Year’s Day sees around 200 fewer births than any given day in England:

U.K. Average Daily Births (The Telegraph UK/Office for National Statistics)

If you absorb best by color-coded blocks, here’s every day of the year plotted out:

Birth registrations in England and Wales, 1995-2014 (The Telegraph UK/Office for National Statistics)

Click on the link to go to the whole table (it’s interactive). Jan. 1st can only claim 1,574 births, which makes it the 364th most-popular birthday.

I don’t know enough to hypothesize if birth patterns are the same in the United States, but I’d love to find out.