The US National Debt: $40 Trillion, Counted Daily

Michael Whitman · Trading since 2017, full-time since 2020 · Published 2026-09-27

The national debt is not an estimate. The Treasury adds up every security it has issued and not yet repaid and publishes the total each business day, to the cent, in a dataset it calls Debt to the Penny.

This page reads that count and three other Treasury datasets directly: who holds the debt, how quickly it has grown, when it crossed each trillion, and what the interest on it now costs.

How it works

Two parts make the total. The Treasury’s definition is simple addition: total public debt outstanding equals debt held by the public plus intragovernmental holdings.

• Debt held by the public is everything owned outside the federal government: individuals, companies, banks, state and local governments, foreign governments and the Federal Reserve Banks. Most of it is marketable securities such as Treasury bills, notes, bonds, inflation-protected securities and floating rate notes, plus savings bonds and a few non-marketable series.
• Intragovernmental holdings are Government Account Series securities held by government trust funds, revolving funds and special funds, plus Federal Financing Bank securities. They are IOUs from one part of the government to another.

Why the split matters. Debt held by the public is what the government has borrowed from the rest of the economy, and it is the part traded in the bond market. Intragovernmental holdings are real obligations to those funds, but the interest on them is paid from one government account into another.

How it grows. When spending is larger than tax receipts, the Treasury sells new securities to cover the gap. When a security matures, the Treasury usually sells a new one to repay it, so the debt rolls over rather than shrinking.

A worked example

The split on 24 Sep 2026, from that day’s Debt to the Penny record:

1. Debt held by the public: $32,362.73 billion.
2. Intragovernmental holdings: $7,706.08 billion.
3. Total public debt outstanding: $32,362.73 billion + $7,706.08 billion = $40,068.81 billion, or $40.07 trillion.
4. Share held by the public: $32,362.73 / $40,068.81 = 80.8%.

One year of growth. On 24 Sep 2025 the total was $37,454.54 billion. The difference is $2,614.27 billion over 365 days, which averages about $7.16 billion a day. Growth is not smooth: the total can fall on days when large securities mature and rise sharply on days when new ones settle.

What a rate change means in dollars. As simple arithmetic, an interest rate one percentage point higher on $32.36 trillion of debt held by the public comes to about $323.6 billion a year. The real effect arrives slowly, because only maturing securities are refinanced at the new rate.

The original data

From 1 Apr 1993 to 24 Sep 2026, the Treasury published 8,400 daily Debt to the Penny records. The first shows $4,225.87 billion; the latest shows $40,068.81 billion. For each whole trillion from $5 trillion to $40 trillion, this page takes the first record at or above it. The trillion crossings file lists all 36; the most recent eight are below.

Longer history comes from the fiscal year-end series, which starts in 1790. The debt first ended a fiscal year above $1 trillion on 30 Sep 1982, at $1,142.0 billion. It was $5,674.2 billion at the end of fiscal 2000, $10,024.7 billion at the end of fiscal 2008 and $37,637.6 billion at the end of fiscal 2025: 6.63 times its 2000 level and 3.75 times its 2008 level.

The month-end series behind the chart is in the month-end debt file. Every figure on this page can be rebuilt from it or from the Treasury’s own downloads named in the sources.

What the interest costs

Interest expense on the public debt doubled in four years. The Treasury’s interest expense dataset reports each line of interest, month by month, with a fiscal-year-to-date total. Adding every line at the end of each fiscal year (30 September) gives the total:

• Fiscal 2021: $562.4 billion, of which $389.0 billion was on securities held by the public.
• Fiscal 2023: $882.6 billion.
• Fiscal 2025: $1,220.0 billion, of which $973.7 billion was on securities held by the public.
• Fiscal 2026 through August: $1,267.8 billion in eleven months, already above the whole of fiscal 2025 and 12.3% more than the $1,128.8 billion of the same eleven months a year earlier.

The rate did more of the work than the size. Total debt at fiscal year-end grew 39.7% from 2020 to 2025. Over fiscal 2021 to 2025, interest expense rose 116.9%. The average interest rate on marketable Treasury debt, which the Treasury also publishes monthly, bottomed at 1.424% in Jan 2022 and was 3.475% in Aug 2026. That month, bills averaged 3.788%, notes 3.345% and bonds 3.453%.

The yearly totals are in the interest expense file, and the monthly average rate back to Jan 2001 is in the average rate file.

When it fails

The headline number fails when it is read as a single idea. Three figures get quoted as “the debt”:

• Total public debt ($40.07 trillion) includes $7.71 trillion the government owes its own trust funds and other accounts.
• Debt held by the public ($32.36 trillion) is the borrowing from outside the government, and it includes the Treasuries held by the Federal Reserve.
• Gross figures in other Treasury tables can differ slightly. The Treasury’s own dataset page notes that total public debt outstanding may be calculated differently in different datasets.

Raw dollar totals fail over long periods. A trillion in 1982 and a trillion in 2026 are not the same size relative to prices or to the economy. This page gives the dollar figures the Treasury publishes; comparing across decades needs inflation or the size of the economy (GDP) as a yardstick, and the debt-to-GDP ratio is not calculated here.

Interest figures fail when the two kinds are mixed. About one fifth of fiscal 2025 interest, $246.4 billion, was credited to government accounts rather than paid to outside holders. Adding it in or leaving it out changes the answer to how much the debt costs, and both versions appear in the news.

And a daily figure fails as a trend. The total moves by tens of billions on settlement days and can dip for weeks when borrowing is held back. Year-over-year changes, such as the $2,614.27 billion rise to 24 Sep 2026, are a steadier read than any single day.

Related

The bond market is where the debt held by the public is bought and sold, and Treasury bills are the shortest securities within it. The interest rate page covers how rates are set, and the yield curve shows what the Treasury pays at each maturity. Inflation is the yardstick for comparing debt figures across decades.

This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money.