Rate Your Birthday

a cake topped with some lit candles before blowing out the cake, on a rustic wooden table full of confetti, party horns and streamers, with a filtered effect

a cake topped with some lit candles before blowing out the cake, on a rustic wooden table full of confetti, party horns and streamers, with a filtered effect

We’re all unique, but less so our birthdays – it seems that statistics recently released show a strong pattern when it comes to the most popular days to cut a birthday cake. A ‘common’ birthday is shared with 12-13,000 other Kiwis – that’s an awful lot of candles blown out every day!

Statistics New Zealand has done the numbers based on birth data from 1980 to 2014. The numbers reveal:

  • 30 September is the most common birthday
  • the 10 most common birthdays all appear in the 13-day period from 19 September to 1 October
  • the least common birthday is 25 December (apart from 29 February, which only occurs in leap years)
  • the least common birthdays tend to be around public holidays: 24–27 December, 1–2 January, 6 February (Waitangi Day),25 April (ANZAC Day).

If you’re interested try the Rank your birthday tool to find out how popular your birthday, or that of your family, is.