Seattle dog-license names in the July 2026 snapshot
Analysis by Marvin Tang · Calculated September 20, 2026 · Source list current as of July 6, 2026
Luna appears on 264 of 26,435 named dog licenses (0.999%) in the City of Seattle pet-license list current as of July 6, 2026. Charlie follows with 193. The figures count licenses in that snapshot; they do not measure names given to puppies during 2026.
The top ten name strings account for 1,553 named licenses (5.87%). Another 5,882 normalized name strings appear on one license each, representing 22.25% of named licenses. An entry can appear once because of spelling or data-entry variation, so this is a string-frequency measure, not a count of deliberately unique names.
Top 20 name strings
Names are grouped after case and whitespace normalization. Tied counts are ordered by normalized string; display position does not imply a meaningful difference.
| Position | Name | Named licenses | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Luna | 264 | 0.999% |
| 2 | Charlie | 193 | 0.730% |
| 3 | Lucy | 173 | 0.654% |
| 4 | Daisy | 171 | 0.647% |
| 5 | Rosie | 135 | 0.511% |
| 6 | Milo | 131 | 0.496% |
| 7 | Ruby | 123 | 0.465% |
| 8 | Bella | 122 | 0.462% |
| 9 | Poppy | 121 | 0.458% |
| 10 | Penny | 120 | 0.454% |
| 11 | Coco | 108 | 0.409% |
| 12 | Scout | 105 | 0.397% |
| 13 | Cooper | 104 | 0.393% |
| 14 | Buddy | 99 | 0.375% |
| 15 | Bailey | 98 | 0.371% |
| 16 | Leo | 98 | 0.371% |
| 17 | Max | 96 | 0.363% |
| 18 | Maggie | 94 | 0.356% |
| 19 | Ollie | 93 | 0.352% |
| 20 | Pepper | 93 | 0.352% |
How to reproduce the counts
The Seattle Pet Licenses catalog describes its list as current on July 6, 2026 and last updated July 7. We retrieved it on September 20. Our source query selects license_number, animal_s_name, and species where species='Dog'.
- Start with 26,449 dog rows. Deduplicate by
license_number; the 1 repeated row had the same normalized name. This leaves 26,448 license numbers. Stop the calculation if a license number has conflicting names or is missing. - Trim and collapse whitespace, uppercase names for grouping, then exclude blank names,
UNKNOWN, andNAME NOT PROVIDED. 13 licenses are excluded, leaving 26,435 named licenses and 8,372 name strings. Other spelling and punctuation variants stay separate. - Count licenses per remaining string. Sort by count descending and normalized string ascending, keep the first 100, and divide each count by 26,435 for the displayed percentage. Count strings occurring on exactly one license separately. The CSV contains aggregate rows only, with no individual license numbers.
Download the exact fetch and export script and aggregation function. Save them together as build_seattle_license_name_snapshot_2026.php and seattle_license_name_aggregate.php, then run the first file with --summary using PHP with curl and mbstring. The JSON includes the retrieval time, method version, all displayed aggregates, and a SHA-256 fingerprint of the filtered source rows. The fingerprint can show whether the live source still matches this release; it cannot restore older rows after the city changes them.
What this snapshot does not measure
The city's list covers current pet licenses, so these counts cannot establish the number of all dogs living in Seattle, annual registrations, or a trend from earlier years. A license number is the deduplication key within this one extract; we do not use it to claim a count of unique dogs across other datasets. Owner ZIP codes are not used to infer where a dog lives. The public dataset may change after this dated release, so a new download could produce different totals.
Source and attribution
Underlying data: City of Seattle, Seattle Pet Licenses, list current July 6, 2026. Filtering and aggregation: iDogNames, calculated September 20, 2026. Cite both when reporting these counts.