Cat Name Trends 2024-2026: What Six Datasets Actually Show

Luna and Milo still own the top

If you adopted a kitten in the last two years and reached for the most popular name in the country, you almost certainly landed on Luna or Milo. Across four independent pet datasets we tracked — Rover’s 2025 rankings, Pumpkin’s 2024 list, Healthy Paws’ 2025 list, and Trupanion’s 2026 figures — the same two names sit at the summit. Luna is the number-one female cat name on every one of them, and Milo leads the male side on most.

The consensus runs deep past the top spot. Healthy Paws’ 2025 top ten reads Luna, Milo, Leo, Mochi, Bella, Oliver, Loki, Daisy, Willow, and Coco — and Pumpkin’s 2024 list opens with the nearly identical Luna, Milo, Leo, Oliver, Lucy. When four companies that share no data and use different customer bases all surface the same handful of names, that is about as close to a true national ranking as cat naming gets. The headline of the last three years is stability at the very top: the celestial-soft Luna and the gentle, two-syllable Milo have become the Bella-and-Max of the cat world.

The fastest-rising cat names of 2025

The top of the list barely moves; the interesting story is underneath it. Rover’s 2025 data ranks names not just by total count but by how fast each one grew year over year, and those growth numbers are where the culture shows up. On the male side the single fastest climber was Tater, up 92% in a year, trailed by Milton (86%), Stewie (75%), Gatsby (70%), Snowball (66%), Caesar (66%), Bones (55%), Asher (52%), Pepe (51%), and Zoro (49%).

The female risers tell a parallel story: Priscilla led at 73%, then Snowball (64%), Pickle (62%), Sissy (61%), Pippin (59%), Martini (59%), Eleanor (58%), Marie (57%), Khaleesi (54%), and Kit (54%). One name, Snowball, climbed fast on both lists at once — a rare unisex breakout.

Read the risers together and two engines stand out. The first is the kitchen: Tater, Pickle, Martini, and Bones are food-and-drink jokes, the kind of name you give a small animal precisely because it is a little ridiculous. The second is a vein of vintage-human names — Milton, Priscilla, Eleanor, Marie, Sissy — the same great-grandparent revival that has been reshaping human baby names, now landing on cats.

Pop culture is doing the naming

The third engine behind the risers is screen and page, and it is worth pulling out on its own because it is the most legible trend in the data. Khaleesi comes straight from Game of Thrones; Gatsby from Fitzgerald by way of a century of film adaptations; Zoro from the One Piece swordsman (a spelling that doubles as the masked Zorro); Stewie from Family Guy; and Caesar from everything between Rome and the Planet of the Apes reboots. None of these are coincidences. A cat is a low-stakes, high-personality canvas, and owners increasingly use that canvas to wave a flag for whatever they were watching the year they adopted.

Rover’s themed breakdowns make the pattern explicit. Its 2025 set sorts rising names into clusters, and the pop-culture clusters — anime, books, movies, television, and music — are among the densest. The anime cluster alone is led by names like Bulma and Goku from Dragon Ball and Jiji, the black cat from Kiki’s Delivery Service. The throughline from Khaleesi to Jiji is the same: people name cats after the stories they love.

The classic top tens, by gender

Strip out the fast movers and you are left with the steady core — the names that do not spike because they never left. Rover’s classic-50 lists give the cleanest view of that core. On the female side the leaders are Luna, Lily, Bella, Kitty, Lucy, and Pepper; on the male side, Milo, Leo, Oliver, Charlie, Loki, and Max.

Two things stand out. First, the male top is quietly dominated by human names — Oliver, Charlie, Max, Leo would all sit comfortably on a kindergarten roster, a sign of how thoroughly cats have moved into the family-member slot once reserved for children. Second, the female list keeps one foot in the old world: Kitty and Pepper are unmistakably cat names in a way that Oliver is not. The female naming pool is simply wider, holding both the human-name trend and the older tradition of naming a cat for what it is.

How the rankings shift around the world

Rover’s international data lets you watch the same names cross borders — and watch where they stop. Luna is the top female name in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Spain alike; only France breaks ranks, crowning Nala instead. The male picture splits more cleanly: Milo leads in the US, UK, and Canada, while both France and Spain hand the crown to Simba. The pull of The Lion King on Romance-language naming is hard to miss.

The trending names diverge far more than the leaders do, because local culture drives what is rising. The fastest-climbing cat name was Tater in the US, but Tillie in the UK, Walter in France, Berlin in Spain, and Marshmallow in Canada. The leaderboard is global; the momentum is local. And in the country’s biggest single market, New York City, the Rover ranking is almost a microcosm of the national one: Luna, Milo, Leo, Charlie, and Lily take the top five.

What changed since 1998

To see how far cat naming has traveled, it helps to look back. The earliest broad list we hold is a 1998 Petplan survey of UK cat names, and the contrast is stark. The 1998 top names were Charlie, Milly, Oscar, Tiger, Poppy, Sophie, Rosie, Smudge, and Lucy. Notice what is there and what is not. Descriptive, coat-based names like Tiger and Smudge sat comfortably in the top ten — you named the cat for how it looked. None of today’s celestial, food, or pop-culture risers appear at all.

A few names bridge the decades. Charlie was already a leader in 1998 and remains a male top-tenner today; Lucy has likewise held on across nearly thirty years. But Luna — the most popular cat name in much of the world right now — does not appear on the 1998 list anywhere. The single biggest shift is the retreat of the purely descriptive name (Tiger, Smudge, Patch) in favor of human names and references, the same migration that turned cats from pets into family members on the paperwork.

Where cat names come from now

Rover’s 2025 release sorts its rising names into roughly two dozen themed clusters, and the clusters are a useful map of the modern cat-naming imagination. They fall into a handful of families:

• Food and drink — the single most productive theme, splitting into sweet (Brownie, Caramel, Cookie, Honey) and savory, and feeding straight into risers like Tater, Pickle, and Martini.
• Pop culture — separate anime, book, movie, television, and music clusters, the densest single area, home to Khaleesi, Gatsby, Jiji, and Zoro.
• Color and coat — bright, dark, and warm sub-themes, the modern descendants of the old Smudge-and-Tiger tradition.
• Heritage — American, European, and Japanese name pools, the last of which overlaps heavily with the anime surge.
• Cosmos and nature — the family that gave us number-one Luna, plus playful entries like Skywalker and Moonshadow.
• Y2K and tech — a small but telling cluster of ironic digital names like Amiga, Jpeg, and Bitcoin, naming a cat after the internet that made it famous.

The clusters confirm what the risers hint at: cat naming in the mid-2020s is overwhelmingly cultural. Food, screen, and personality have crowded out the simple descriptive label, and the names people reach for are increasingly little jokes, little references, and little tributes.

Sources and method

This report compiles publicly reported pet-name rankings from six sources, recorded in the iCatNames database and presented here with attribution rather than as a single combined score. Cat-specific figures dominate where available. Growth percentages are Rover’s own year-over-year measures, not iCatNames estimates. Where a name links to a page on this site, that page is its dictionary entry; names without a link are reported as published.

• Rover, 2025 — the largest source, covering the top 100, gender lists, trending names, themed clusters, and per-country leaders. Published via Rover’s 2025 pet-name release and regional reporting. Republished with Rover’s permission.
• Pumpkin, 2024 — most common cat names.
• Healthy Paws, 2025 — top pet names of 2025.
• Trupanion, 2026 — most popular pet names.
• Petplan / Wikipedia, 1998 — a UK survey used for historical contrast, via Wikipedia’s record of popular cat names.

See also our methodology and the trending cat names roundup.