U.S. National Debt by President: Dollar and Percentage Change

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Current Values

The U.S. national debt by president is usually measured as the change in gross federal debt between the fiscal year a president’s term began and the fiscal year it ended. On that basis, Joe Biden has the largest dollar increase among presidents from Harry Truman onward, and Ronald Reagan has the largest percentage increase. Over the full history of the country, the biggest jumps relative to the starting debt came under Abraham Lincoln, whose Civil War borrowing multiplied the debt nearly 40 times, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose increase is the largest in percentage terms among 20th and 21st century presidents.

The ranking depends on the yardstick. Dollar figures favor recent presidents because the economy, the federal budget and the existing debt are all far larger than they were decades ago. Percentages favor presidents who started from a small base. Debt measured against gross domestic product (GDP) adds a third view by asking how heavy the debt is relative to the economy that supports it.

How the Table Measures Debt by President

Gross federal debt at fiscal-year end

The historical table uses gross federal debt at the end of each federal fiscal year, from FRED and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) data. The federal fiscal year runs from October 1 through September 30 and is named for the calendar year in which it ends. FY2025, for example, ran from October 1, 2024, to September 30, 2025.

Gross federal debt combines two parts:

• Debt held by the public: Treasury bills, notes, bonds and other securities owned by investors, banks, foreign governments and the Federal Reserve.
• Intragovernmental holdings: securities the Treasury issues to federal trust funds such as Social Security and Medicare when those funds take in more than they pay out.

Because both parts are included, gross debt can rise even in a year when the government borrows nothing new from the public. A trust fund surplus invested in Treasury securities adds to gross debt.

Where each term starts and ends

The starting figure is the debt for the fiscal year in which the term began, so each starting value equals the predecessor’s ending value. Biden’s starting debt matches Trump’s ending debt, and his ending debt is the FY2025 gross debt. The fiscal year in which a president takes office is therefore credited to the outgoing president.

This convention exists because a new president inherits a budget already in force. A president inaugurated in January takes office about four months into a fiscal year whose spending and tax laws were set the year before, and the administration’s first proposed budget covers the following fiscal year. Any boundary choice shifts some debt between neighboring presidents. Sources that use the Treasury’s daily total on inauguration days, or debt held by the public instead of gross debt, can produce totals for the same administration that differ by hundreds of billions of dollars.

Debt versus deficit

The two terms are related but not interchangeable:

• A budget deficit is the shortfall in a single year when outlays exceed revenue. A surplus is the reverse.
• The national debt is the running total of what the government owes. Deficits add to it, and surpluses can be used to pay part of it down.

The change in debt over a term is roughly the sum of the deficits run during that term. It is not exactly the same, because some borrowing does not count toward the deficit, such as certain federal lending and the trust fund mechanics described above. A table of the change in the federal deficit by president answers a different question: whether the annual shortfall grew or shrank, not how much total debt was added.

Reading Dollar and Percentage Change

The table reports two calculations for each presidency:

• Dollar change = debt at end − debt at start
• Percentage change = (debt at end − debt at start) ÷ debt at start × 100

A hypothetical example shows why the two can rank presidents differently. Suppose President A starts with $500 billion of debt and leaves with $1 trillion. President B starts with $10 trillion and leaves with $15 trillion. President A added $500 billion, a 100% increase. President B added $5 trillion, ten times as many dollars, but only a 50% increase. Neither measure is wrong. They answer different questions.

Adjusting for term length

Two-term presidents have twice as long to accumulate debt, so their totals tend to be larger than those of one-term presidents. Two ways to put terms on equal footing:

• Average dollars added per year = dollar change ÷ number of fiscal years in the term
• Compound annual growth rate = (debt at end ÷ debt at start)^(1 ÷ years) − 1

Using the hypothetical President A over an eight-year term, a doubling of the debt works out to about 9.1% per year, because 2^(1/8) is roughly 1.091. A president who doubled the debt in four years would show about 18.9% per year. The total percentage change is identical, but the pace is very different.

Percentages over a term also compound and do not simply add. If debt rises 40% in one term and 30% in the next, the combined increase is 1.40 × 1.30 − 1 = 82%, not 70%.

Adjusting for inflation and the economy

Dollar figures in the table are nominal. They are not adjusted for inflation, so a dollar of debt added in the 1950s is counted the same as a dollar added in the 2020s. Price levels and the size of the economy have both grown many times over since then. Comparing debt with GDP addresses both issues at once:

• Debt-to-GDP = gross federal debt ÷ nominal GDP × 100

Under this measure, debt can grow in dollars while the ratio falls, as long as the economy grows faster than the debt. The year-by-year series on U.S. national debt by year shows how the totals built up between presidencies.

The Three Current Values

Three current values each measure something slightly different:

• Debt to the penny is the Treasury’s daily total of public debt outstanding. It moves every business day and is the most current number.
• FY2025 gross debt is the fiscal-year-end figure that also serves as the final row value in the table. It is fixed once the year closes.
• Debt-to-GDP relates debt to the size of the economy using the formula above.

The daily figure and the fiscal-year figure will not match because they are taken on different dates. When citing how much the national debt was when a president took office or left, the fiscal-year figure is the one that lines up with the table.

What Drives the Debt During a Presidency

A president proposes budgets, signs or vetoes legislation and directs the government’s response to emergencies. Congress writes the appropriations and tax laws. Much of the debt added in any term reflects events that neither branch planned for.

War

Before 1930, almost every federal deficit came from war. In 1860, the year before the Civil War began, the national debt was about $64.8 million. By the war’s end in 1865, the government owed more than $2.6 billion.

Woodrow Wilson’s financing of World War I took federal debt from about $2.9 billion in 1913 to more than $23.9 billion by 1921. World War II produced some of the largest deficits relative to GDP in U.S. history. The government borrowed around $211 billion to pay for that war, much of it through war bonds sold to the public.

In the 2000s, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq added to the debt under George W. Bush, and their costs continued under Barack Obama and Donald Trump’s first term. One academic estimate puts the total cost of the post-9/11 wars over 20 years at around $8 trillion.

Recessions and emergency relief

Recessions add to the debt in two ways. Tax revenue falls as incomes and profits shrink, and spending rises automatically on programs such as unemployment insurance. Any stimulus Congress passes comes on top of that.

• American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (2009): Obama signed this $832 billion package shortly after taking office to counter job losses from the Great Recession.
• CARES Act (March 2020): Trump signed this roughly $2.2 trillion pandemic relief bill, the largest rescue package in U.S. history at the time, which included direct payments to households.
• American Rescue Plan Act (March 2021): Biden signed this roughly $1.9 trillion package, which extended unemployment benefits, sent more direct payments and expanded the Child Tax Credit.

Under the table’s fiscal-year convention, FY2020 and FY2021, the two years most affected by pandemic spending, both fall in Trump’s row. Biden’s row begins with debt at the end of FY2021.

Tax policy

Tax cuts add to the debt when they reduce revenue more than any resulting growth recovers. Reagan’s supply-side program combined broad tax cuts with reductions in social spending and a 35% increase in defense spending over his two terms. Bush signed major tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. Obama’s tenure included an $858 billion tax deal in 2010 that extended those cuts. In July 2025, Trump signed H.R. 1, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which extended and expanded tax cuts. The Congressional Budget Office estimates it will increase the debt by $3.4 trillion over the following decade.

Inherited commitments and interest

Much of the budget runs on autopilot. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and interest payments are set by existing law, and their costs grow with the population, health care prices and interest rates, whoever is in office. Interest is self-reinforcing: a larger debt costs more to carry, and when rates rise, refinanced Treasury securities cost more as well. These structural deficits help explain why the debt has risen in dollar terms under every president in the table, Democratic and Republican alike.

Presidents With the Largest Increases

By percentage

• Abraham Lincoln (1861 to 1865): The Civil War multiplied the debt nearly 40-fold, the largest multiple in U.S. history.
• Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933 to 1945): New Deal programs added to the debt early in his presidency, but World War II was the larger driver. His increase is the largest percentage rise of any 20th or 21st century president.
• Woodrow Wilson (1913 to 1921): World War I financing raised the debt roughly eightfold.
• Ronald Reagan (1981 to 1989): In the table, which begins with Truman, Reagan’s +188.28% is the highest. Debt nearly tripled over his two terms.
• George W. Bush (2001 to 2009): At +105.83%, Bush is the other president in the table whose term more than doubled the debt. Two wars, the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, and recessions in 2001 and 2008 all contributed.

Barack Obama follows at +70.14%. The smallest increases in the table belong to Truman, Kennedy and Eisenhower, a period when postwar growth and modest deficits kept the debt nearly flat in dollars while it fell sharply relative to GDP.

By dollars

Among the presidents in the table, the three largest dollar increases are Biden, Obama across both terms, and Trump’s first term. All three exceed $8 trillion, and together they account for most of the debt accumulated since Truman. That reflects the base effect described earlier as much as any policy choice. A 30% increase on a $28 trillion base adds more dollars than a 188% increase on a base under $1 trillion.

Did any president reduce the debt?

No president in the table, Democratic or Republican, left office with lower gross debt than he started with. Bill Clinton came closest: the government ran budget surpluses in the late 1990s, and debt held by the public declined during those years. Gross debt still grew by about a third over his presidency, because Social Security surpluses were invested in Treasury securities, which counts as intragovernmental debt. Each row also reflects the Congress the president served with.

Trump’s Second Term and the Debt Ceiling

Trump’s second term is not yet a row in the table. Under the fiscal-year convention, FY2025 counts toward Biden, so comparisons for the second term start with FY2026, which began on October 1, 2025. Until that term ends, the closest measure is the gap between the daily debt-to-the-penny figure and the FY2025 gross debt.

The debt ceiling is the statutory maximum the Treasury may borrow to pay obligations Congress has already approved. Raising it does not authorize new spending. When the limit is reached, the Treasury uses “extraordinary measures,” such as temporarily suspending certain trust fund investments, until Congress raises or suspends the ceiling. If it does not, the government risks default.

The Treasury reached the limit in January 2023 and used extraordinary measures until Congress suspended the ceiling into 2025. In July 2025, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act raised the limit by $5 trillion, to $41.1 trillion.

Limits of Attributing Debt to One President

Treat the table as a record of what happened to the debt during each presidency. It does not measure what each president caused:

• Shared authority: Congress passes appropriations and tax laws, and divided government means many budgets reflect compromises between the parties.
• Lagged effects: Policies keep affecting deficits long after the president who signed them leaves. Tax cuts, entitlement expansions and war costs carry into later terms, and the post-9/11 war costs spanned three presidencies.
• Events outside anyone’s control: Recessions, pandemics and attacks force spending and cut revenue whatever the plans were.
• Boundary choices: Shifting start and end dates by one fiscal year can move hundreds of billions of dollars between neighboring presidents.
• Nominal dollars: Older presidencies look smaller in dollars than they were in economic weight.

Historical Data

Gross federal debt at fiscal-year end (FRED / OMB); start = fiscal year the term began.

The Bottom Line

Readers comparing presidents on the debt should pick a yardstick first, since dollar totals favor recent presidents and percentages favor those starting from a small base. Debt-to-GDP and per-year rates give fairer comparisons across eras and term lengths. The table records what happened during each presidency, and Congress, lagged policies and emergencies all shape those numbers.