The 20 most common surnames in Spain (INE, 2025)
Figures from Spain’s National Statistics Institute (INE) on 1 January 2025, for a population of 49.1 million.
The list
These are the twenty surnames most people in Spain carry as their first surname. The columns give how many people carry it first, second, and as both (García García, for instance).
| # | Surname | First | Second | Both |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | García | 1,446,937 | 1,468,824 | 74,765 |
| 2 | Rodríguez | 939,214 | 950,067 | 41,281 |
| 3 | González | 930,137 | 939,512 | 39,476 |
| 4 | Fernández | 896,725 | 908,388 | 48,147 |
| 5 | López | 871,380 | 880,428 | 32,802 |
| 6 | Martínez | 832,396 | 840,399 | 36,676 |
| 7 | Sánchez | 818,287 | 828,609 | 32,605 |
| 8 | Pérez | 779,313 | 794,277 | 25,085 |
| 9 | Gómez | 496,272 | 500,028 | 13,122 |
| 10 | Martín | 475,139 | 473,220 | 19,346 |
| 11 | Jiménez | 399,394 | 400,335 | 21,940 |
| 12 | Hernández | 380,919 | 385,264 | 15,194 |
| 13 | Ruiz | 366,644 | 371,017 | 8,102 |
| 14 | Díaz | 350,246 | 351,061 | 8,174 |
| 15 | Moreno | 324,435 | 326,774 | 9,987 |
| 16 | Muñoz | 284,951 | 285,616 | 6,449 |
| 17 | Álvarez | 281,150 | 280,623 | 8,850 |
| 18 | Romero | 227,391 | 227,881 | 4,454 |
| 19 | Gutiérrez | 199,928 | 201,875 | 3,682 |
| 20 | Alonso | 189,942 | 188,027 | 4,239 |
García, far ahead
Almost 1.45 million people have García as their first surname: about 2.9% of the population. And more than 74,000 are called García García.
Between them, the top eight surnames are the first surname of more than one in seven people living in Spain.
The ‑ez ending: “son of”
Seven of the top eight end in ‑ez: Rodríguez, González, Fernández, López, Martínez, Sánchez, Pérez. They are patronymics: in the Middle Ages ‑ez meant “son of”, so Rodríguez was Rodrigo’s son, Fernández Fernando’s and Martínez Martín’s.
With few, much-repeated first names, these surnames arose in thousands of unrelated families at once. Sharing an ‑ez surname says very little about a common ancestor.
What about rare ones?
The INE lists about 86,500 surnames carried first by at least 20 people, but only about 4,400 are carried by more than a thousand. Most Spanish surnames are quite rare, and if one of yours isn’t in the statistics, fewer than twenty people carry it, or it comes from abroad.
Those rare surnames are the most useful in a family tree: an uncommon surname in two different branches often leads to a shared ancestor.
Look up yours
A Thousand Surnames looks up every surname in your tree in these INE figures: how many people carry it, which is your rarest, and where in Spain it is most common today. The lookup happens on your device, without sending your surnames anywhere.