Holiday Calendar

National Nico Day

Next celebratedWednesday, April 7, 2027

In Spain, Nico is almost entirely a children's name: the population register lists 2,661 men and boys with a mean age of 6.8 years, and only sixteen names in the country run younger. April 7 belongs to all of them.

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Last updated September 7, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar TeamHave an update or spot an error?
YEARLY DATEApril 7
OBSERVED INInternationally
CATEGORYNames
ORIGIN

Community Origin

FOUNDING ENTITY
Not documented
FIRST OBSERVED
Not documented
HOW THE HOLIDAY CAME TO BE

A day for a name that three countries count very differently.

No documented founder or formal establishment record has been identified for National Nico Day. The observance circulates on holiday-listing calendars with an April 7 date, and none of the sources opened for this page accounts for the choice.

+ Know the story? Submit a founder Help us complete this holiday
INTRO

Spain's Nicos average under seven years old

Spain's population register lists 2,661 men and boys named Nico. Their mean age is 6.8 years.

That is not a quirk of a small sample. Of the 1,268 male names carried by a thousand or more people in Spain, only sixteen belong to a population younger than Nico's. In that country the name is, almost entirely, a children's name.

The name itself is far older than that, and it did not start in Spain. Nico is a short form of Nicholas, and the same four letters are doing very different work in three different countries. April 7 is the day set aside for everyone who carries them, though no source consulted for this page says who set it aside.

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GOOD TO KNOW

Surprising facts about National Nico Day

Abroad, the film was called just Nico

Above the Law opened on 8 April 1988 with Steven Seagal as Nicolo 'Nico' Toscani, an Italian immigrant from Chicago who is recruited by the CIA, quits, and joins the police. The AFI Catalog records trade reports in Variety and Screen International stating that the film went into foreign release under the single-word title Nico.

Four days, three thousand dollars, one national registry

The Velvet Underground and Nico joined the Library of Congress National Recording Registry in 2006. The Registry's own essay records that the album took 'just four days and $3,000' to make, and that Andy Warhol imposed Nico on the band as a lead singer whose vocals were, at first, not welcomed by the group.

146 years, never once in the top 100

The American national name files run from 1880 to 2025. Across all 146 of those years Nico has never reached the top 100 boys' names, under either of the two ranking conventions the raw counts support.

Two Nicos in one championship top ten

The 2016 Formula 1 drivers' championship finished with Nico Rosberg first on 385 points and Nico Hulkenberg ninth on 72. Both drivers are German.

The Dutch name bank holds 443,801 first names

The Meertens Instituut name bank covers every distinct single first name registered in the Netherlands, drawn from the population register and from nineteenth-century marriage records. Nico is one of 443,801 of them.

ORIGINS

Nico Day history

CHAPTER 01

A Dutch name that all but stopped

The Meertens Instituut keeps the Netherlands first-name bank, built from the national population register. It holds 5,261 men whose first name is Nico, and 4,069 more who carry it further down their names.

Its birth-year series is unusually flat. Every year from 1940 to 1991 lands between 61 and 143 boys. The median Dutch Nico was born in 1964.

Then it falls away. By 1990 the series is down to 80 boys a year. After 2005 it never reaches twenty again.

CHAPTER 02

America came late and has not stopped

The Social Security Administration's national files reach back to 1880. Nico does not appear in them until 1960, and then only six boys.

It stays tiny for a generation. The agency lists 284 boys named Nico across 1960 to 1987, and it hides any name with fewer than five births in a year, so that is a floor rather than a total.

Then 1988. The count went from 10 boys in 1987 to 96, the first time Nico appeared among America's thousand most-used boys' names. It reached 315 the year after, and nothing consulted for this page explains why.

It has climbed ever since, passing a thousand boys a year in 2020. American parents chose the name for 2,066 boys in 2025, the most in the whole series. That one year outruns the entire 1960 to 1987 stretch by more than seven times.

CHAPTER 03

The date is the odd part

Nicholas names already have a day. The St Nicholas Center puts the name day for people named after the saint on 6 December, or 19 December in some traditions.

April 7 sits nowhere near either date, and no source opened for this page connects the two or explains the choice. The day has a fixed date, a settled name, and a blank where its reason should be.

TIMELINE

Timeline

Nico enters the American record

The Social Security Administration lists the name nationally for the first time, with six boys born that year.

The Dutch high-water mark

The Meertens series records 143 Dutch boys born with the name, its highest single year in the whole run from 1880.

Into America's top thousand

The count jumps to 96 boys, the first year Nico appears among the 1,000 most-used American boys' names.

The Dutch line keeps sinking

The series is down to 33 Dutch boys born with the name, from 143 in 1965.

A thousand in a single year

American parents name 1,045 boys Nico, the first year the annual count passes a thousand.

The best year on record

2,066 American boys are named Nico, at rank 174, the highest count and the best rank in the series.
That definitely wasn't the most enjoyable race I've ever had!
Nico RosbergSpeaking after the 2016 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, which made him Formula 1 world champion

BY THE NUMBERS

National Nico Day by the Numbers

61,194
Spanish men named Nicolas
28.9 yrs
Mean age, Spanish men named Nicolas
21,294
US boys named Nico since 1880
1,028
US girls named Nico since 1880

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why We Love National Nico Day

Absence

A missing name is a rare name, not an absent one.

The Social Security Administration states its own rule plainly: to safeguard privacy it excludes from these files 'certain names that would indicate, or would allow the ability to determine, names with fewer than 5 occurrences in any geographic area'. So the years when Nico is missing from the American files are years when four or fewer boys got it, not years when none did. The Dutch name bank applies the same guard, printing anything under five as a suppressed value rather than a number.

Standalone

The short form is a name in its own right

Behind the Name files Nico as a masculine given name in Italian, Dutch, German, Spanish and Portuguese use, not as a nickname attached to something longer. The Dutch bank is more cautious: its entire explanation of Nico reads 'see Nicolaas'. Two reference works, two answers to whether this is a name or an abbreviation.

Vintage

A first name works as a rough date stamp

Spain's register publishes a mean age for every name held by twenty or more residents, which turns a first name into an approximate birth cohort. Antonio, the most common male name in the country, averages 57.5 years, which tells you roughly when its bearers were born.

GET INVOLVED

How to Celebrate National Nico Day

COMPARE

Compare the short form with the long one

Run Nico and Nicolas through the same Spanish register and the gap is immediate: the long form is carried by a much larger and much older population. Try the same trick with Nicolaas in the Dutch name bank.

THROW

Throw the party the way name-day countries do

Name days are commonly kept in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Finland, Greece, Italy, Cyprus, Hungary, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Sweden, Spain and Latin America. The traditional format is an open house where anyone may stop in, with the honoree doing the serving.

ASK

Ask a Nico what is on the birth certificate

Registers count Nico as a first name in its own right, so plenty of Nicos are not short for anything at all. Others will tell you Nicholas, Nicolas, Nicolaas or Nicodemus. Asking is most of the point of a name day.

FIND

Find out how rare the name was in your birth year

The American files are broken out year by year, so you can look up how many boys born the same year as you were given the name. For this name the answer changes sharply depending on which side of 1988 you were born.

Test your knowledge

How well do you know National Nico Day?

1 / 8

What is the mean age of men and boys named Nico on Spain's population register?

Answer

No. A full-text search of the Federal Register returns no document naming National Nico Day, and no proclamation or statute for it turned up in any other source consulted, though that index does not cover congressional resolutions.

COLOPHON

Sources

How we know what’s on this page. References, not endorsements.

12sources
10primary records
5independently dated
Primary records
Instituto Nacional de Estadistica (Spain)Reference date 1 January 2022
Lista de nombres con frecuencia igual o mayor a 20 personas
The Spanish statistics office's workbook of every given name held by 20 or more residents, with its frequency and the mean age of the people carrying it, taken from the Padron Continuo. It is the source for Nico's 2,661 bearers at a mean age of 6.8 years, for Nicolas at 61,194 and 28.9 years, and for the comparison against the 1,268 male names held by a thousand or more people.
View source
Meertens Instituut (KNAW)Register reference 1 January 2018
Nederlandse Voornamenbank: Nico
The Dutch first-name bank's entry for Nico, giving 5,261 men with it as a first name and 4,069 with it as a subsequent name on the national population register.
View source
Meertens Instituut (KNAW)Register reference 1 January 2018
Populariteit van Nico als eerste naam voor mannen, 1880-2017
The year-by-year Dutch series behind that entry, from which the 1940 to 1991 plateau, the 1964 median birth year, the 1965 high of 143 and the collapse after 1990 are read.
View source
Meertens Instituut (KNAW)
Nederlandse Voornamenbank: aanwijzingen voor het gebruik en achtergrondinformatie
The name bank's own methodology page: it documents the 443,801 distinct first names covered, the suppression of counts below five, and the fact that the from-1880 series counts people of Dutch nationality born in the Netherlands and is close to complete only after 1930.
View source
Social Security Administration (United States)
Popular Baby Names: beyond the top 1000 names
The agency's national baby-name dataset and the page stating its privacy rule, which excludes names with fewer than five occurrences. Every American figure on this page is computed from the year-by-year national files it distributes, 1880 through 2025.
View source
American Film Institute
AFI Catalog: Above the Law (1988)
The AFI's catalog record for the film, giving its 8 April 1988 release, Steven Seagal's credits and his character Nicolo 'Nico' Toscani, and the trade-press reports in Variety and Screen International that it was released abroad under the title Nico.
View source
Library of Congress, National Recording Preservation Board
The Velvet Underground and Nico (1967), essay by Cary O'Dell
The Registry essay accompanying the album's 2006 selection, which records the four-day, $3,000 recording and Andy Warhol's decision to install Nico as the band's lead singer.
View source
Formula 12016
2016 Drivers' Standings
The sport's own final championship table for 2016, with Nico Rosberg first on 385 points, Lewis Hamilton second on 380 and Nico Hulkenberg ninth on 72, both German.
View source
Formula 127 November 2016
Rosberg crowned champion as Hamilton wins Abu Dhabi thriller
Formula 1's report on the race that settled the 2016 title, carrying Rosberg's own words minutes after it finished.
View source
Federal Register (United States)
Documents search: National Nico Day
The full-text search showing that no Federal Register document names the day.
View source
Additional coverage
St Nicholas Center
Name Day Celebration: St. Nicholas
A reference page on how name days are kept, the countries where they remain common, the open-house format, and the statement that 6 December or 19 December is the name day for people named after St Nicholas.
View source
Behind the Name
Nico
The etymology reference's entry for Nico, listing it as a masculine short form of Nicholas or Nicodemus in Italian, Dutch, German, Spanish and Portuguese use.
View source
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