U.S. National Debt by Year

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Current Values

The U.S. national debt is the total amount the federal government owes on the Treasury securities it has issued. It is a running balance, not an annual figure: each year’s number carries every past deficit, minus any surpluses, plus borrowing between federal accounts. Gross federal debt is measured at the end of each fiscal year, and the year-by-year change is close to, but not the same as, that year’s budget deficit.

To read the history correctly, separate three ideas: the dollar level of the debt, how fast it grew in a given year, and how large it is relative to the economy. Each can move in a different direction.

What the Numbers Measure

Gross debt and its two parts

The headline figure, often called total public debt outstanding, has two components:

• Debt held by the public: Treasury securities owned by anyone outside the federal government. That includes individuals, corporations, banks, mutual funds, pension funds, insurers, state and local governments, the Federal Reserve banks, and foreign investors and governments.
• Intragovernmental holdings: debt one part of the government owes another. Most of it is special Treasury securities held by federal trust funds, such as those for Social Security, Medicare and federal employee retirement, which invest their surplus receipts in Treasury debt.

Debt held by the public is by far the larger share and has grown much faster over the past decade. Intragovernmental debt rises more slowly because it depends on trust fund surpluses, and it can shrink when a trust fund redeems securities to pay benefits.

Economists usually treat debt held by the public as the better measure of the government’s claim on credit markets, because intragovernmental debt is money the government owes itself. Gross debt matters for legal and accounting purposes, and it is close to the figure the debt ceiling applies to.

Fiscal year, not calendar year

Each row in the historical table shows the debt on the last day of the federal fiscal year. Since fiscal 1977, the fiscal year has run from October 1 to September 30, so “2025” means the balance on September 30, 2025. Before 1977 the fiscal year ended June 30. A figure for a calendar year (December 31) or the Treasury’s daily “Debt to the Penny” reading will not match the fiscal-year table exactly.

The historical series comes from FRED (from OMB data), and current values come from the Treasury’s daily debt report. The two use slightly different definitions and dates, so small gaps between them are normal.

What the national debt does not include

The federal debt counts only obligations backed by Treasury securities. It excludes:

• Debt issued by state and local governments (municipal bonds).
• Household and business debt such as mortgages, credit cards, auto loans and corporate bonds.
• Future benefit promises that are not yet owed, such as projected Social Security and Medicare payments beyond what the trust funds hold.

The national debt is also not the same as U.S. external debt, which counts everything U.S. residents, public and private, owe to foreigners.

How to Read the Table and Chart

The change column

The change column is this year’s fiscal-year-end debt minus last year’s:

Annual change = Debt at end of year t − Debt at end of year t−1

To turn that into a growth rate:

Growth rate = Annual change ÷ Debt at end of year t−1 × 100

Hypothetical example: if debt ends one year at $20 trillion and the next at $21.5 trillion, the change is $1.5 trillion and the growth rate is 7.5%. A $1.5 trillion increase on a $35 trillion base would be only about 4.3%. As the base grows, the same dollar increase is a smaller percentage, so dollar changes alone overstate how fast the debt is growing in recent decades.

Growth has been uneven. The fiscal 2020 increase of $4.23 trillion, driven by pandemic relief, is the largest dollar jump in the series. Fiscal 2015 rose by only $326 billion, partly because of how the Treasury managed cash around a debt limit suspension. Annual changes depend on borrowing timing as well as spending decisions.

Why the change is not exactly the deficit

The deficit is the gap between what the government spends and what it collects in a fiscal year. Borrowing covers that gap, but the debt can also move for other reasons:

• Trust fund surpluses add to intragovernmental debt even when the overall budget is balanced.
• Changes in the Treasury’s cash balance: if the Treasury builds up its cash account, it borrows more than the deficit requires. If it draws the account down, it borrows less.
• Federal credit programs, such as student loans, require cash up front that the budget records differently.

This explains a well-known puzzle in U.S. debt history. The federal government ran unified budget surpluses from fiscal 1998 through 2001, yet gross debt still rose in each of those years. Debt held by the public fell, but Social Security surpluses invested in Treasury securities pushed intragovernmental debt up by more. Gross debt ended fiscal 2001 at $5.77 trillion, still $141 billion higher than a year earlier.

The debt-to-GDP column

The debt-to-GDP ratio compares what the government owes with what the economy produces in a year:

Debt-to-GDP = Debt ÷ Nominal GDP × 100

The ratio falls whenever nominal GDP grows faster in percentage terms than the debt, even if the debt is still rising. Fiscal 2022 and 2023 show this. The debt grew by $2.45 trillion and then $2.15 trillion, but the ratio dropped from 123.2% in 2021 to 120.6% and then 120.4%. High inflation in those years raised nominal GDP quickly, which enlarged the denominator. Inflation reduces the real burden of debt that already exists, but it also tends to push up interest rates on new borrowing.

There is no fixed ratio at which a country defaults. One World Bank study estimated that ratios above about 77% sustained over long periods are associated with slower growth. That is one study’s threshold, not a rule. The U.S. ratio crossed that level during the financial crisis, from 67.5% in fiscal 2008 to 82.1% in 2009, and has stayed above it since.

The president column

Each fiscal year is assigned to the president in office when that year began. Fiscal 2017 is listed under Barack Obama and fiscal 2021 under Donald Trump, even though new presidents took office in January of those years. This matches the budget cycle, since a fiscal year’s spending is largely set before it starts. Presidents also inherit tax laws, entitlement formulas and economic conditions they did not choose, so debt growth during a term is not the same as debt caused by that president.

U.S. Debt History by Era

From the founding to the Civil War

The United States has carried debt since its founding. The Revolutionary War left the new government with more than $75 million in obligations, which the federal government took on, including state war debts. In 1835, under Andrew Jackson, the debt was almost entirely paid off, the only time that has happened. It did not last. By the end of the Civil War in 1865, the debt had passed $2 billion.

1900 to 1940

World War I pushed the debt above $25 billion. Budget surpluses in the 1920s reduced it to roughly $16 billion to $17 billion by 1929 and 1930. The Great Depression reversed that. Tax revenue collapsed and New Deal spending expanded, so the debt climbed to about $43 billion by 1940. The debt ceiling also dates from this period. Congress first set borrowing limits in 1917 and created an overall limit in 1939.

World War II and the postwar decades

The largest debt buildup relative to the economy came during World War II. Debt rose from about $49 billion in 1941 to about $259 billion in 1945, and gross debt ended the war above 100% of GDP. The next two decades show how a high ratio can come down without paying off the debt. The dollar amount barely moved, staying in the $250 billion to $330 billion range through the mid-1960s, while the economy grew strongly. The ratio fell steadily as a result.

The 1970s through the 1990s

Vietnam War spending, Great Society programs and the high inflation of the 1970s raised the dollar debt, though inflation kept the ratio relatively contained. In the 1980s, tax cuts combined with higher defense spending pushed the debt past $1 trillion early in the decade, and it roughly tripled by the decade’s end. Deficit-reduction agreements in the early 1990s, strong growth and rising tax receipts led to the surpluses of fiscal 1998 to 2001.

2001 to the present

Since 2001, the debt has risen in every year shown, in larger increments. Tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, when annual defense outlays passed $600 billion, kept deficits going through the mid-2000s. The 2008 financial crisis and Great Recession then sharply increased borrowing: lower tax receipts, higher automatic spending on programs such as unemployment insurance, and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a stimulus of about $831 billion. Gross debt went from $9.99 trillion in fiscal 2008 to $13.53 trillion in 2010.

Gross debt more than doubled from $16.05 trillion at the end of fiscal 2012 to $37.38 trillion at the end of 2025. The steepest part came with COVID-19. Federal spending rose about 50% between fiscal 2019 and 2021, driven by relief measures on top of the 2017 tax cuts. The debt-to-GDP ratio reached 126.1% in fiscal 2020, the highest value in the series. After 2021, annual increases stayed above $2 trillion even though the emergency programs ended.

What Drives the Debt Today

Mandatory spending and revenue

The debt grows because spending exceeds revenue year after year. The biggest spending categories are Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Their costs are set by eligibility rules and benefit formulas in law, not by annual appropriations, so they rise automatically as the population ages and health costs grow. Defense, other discretionary programs and interest make up much of the rest.

Revenue comes mainly from individual income taxes, payroll taxes and corporate income taxes. Tax cuts reduce revenue unless offset elsewhere, and recessions cut receipts while raising spending on safety-net programs. Both effects showed up in 2009 and 2020.

Events and policy choices

Wars, financial crises and pandemics produce the sharpest jumps, because they combine new spending with weaker revenue. Policy choices set the baseline between those shocks: Congress controls taxing and spending, and the president proposes budgets and signs or vetoes legislation.

Interest costs

Like any borrower, the government pays interest, and interest becomes part of the deficit that must itself be borrowed. Total interest cost depends on how much debt is outstanding and the rates on each security. When the Federal Open Market Committee raises the federal funds target range, rates on Treasury bills rise quickly. Longer-term notes and bonds reprice gradually as old issues mature and are refinanced.

For most of the 2010s, very low rates kept interest costs fairly stable even as the debt grew. The Fed’s rate increases in 2022 and 2023, made to fight inflation, changed that. As maturing low-rate debt is replaced with higher-rate debt, interest has become one of the fastest-growing parts of the budget.

Hypothetical example: if $10 trillion of maturing debt that paid 1% is refinanced at 4%, annual interest on that slice rises from $100 billion to $400 billion, with no change in the amount borrowed.

Who Holds the Debt

Marketable and nonmarketable securities

Treasury debt comes in two forms:

• Marketable securities can be bought and sold on the secondary market: Treasury bills (maturities of one year or less), notes (two to ten years), bonds (20 and 30 years), Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) and floating rate notes. They are sold at auction.
• Nonmarketable securities cannot be transferred to other investors. They include savings bonds, the Government Account Series held by federal trust funds, and State and Local Government Series securities.

Nearly all debt held by the public is marketable. Most intragovernmental debt is in the Government Account Series.

The holders

Most of the debt is owned by domestic investors. Large holders include the Federal Reserve, mutual funds, banks and other depository institutions, state and local governments, pension funds and insurance companies, along with individuals. Foreign governments and private foreign investors hold a substantial minority. The Fed’s holdings rise when it buys Treasuries to support markets or the economy and fall when it lets them run off its balance sheet.

The Bureau of the Fiscal Service, part of the Treasury, publishes the official debt figures. Treasury aims to finance the government at the lowest cost over time by issuing regular, predictable amounts of safe and liquid securities. Uncertain borrowing needs and debt limit standoffs make that harder.

The Debt Ceiling

The debt ceiling, or debt limit, is the legal cap Congress sets on how much the Treasury can borrow. It does not authorize new spending. It limits the Treasury’s ability to borrow to pay for spending and tax decisions Congress has already made. When debt reaches the limit, the Treasury uses “extraordinary measures,” such as temporarily suspending investments in certain federal retirement funds, to keep paying bills.

If those measures run out before Congress raises or suspends the limit, the government could miss payments, including payments on Treasury securities. That would be a default, with potentially severe consequences for U.S. and global financial markets. Congress has raised or suspended the limit many times, often at the last minute.

Debt limit episodes leave marks in the table. Borrowing slows while the cap binds, then jumps once it is lifted and the Treasury rebuilds its cash. A small annual change can reflect where a debt limit episode fell relative to September 30, not lower deficits.

Limits of the Data

• Nominal dollars: the figures are not adjusted for inflation. A trillion dollars in 1981 bought far more than a trillion today. For comparisons across decades, use debt-to-GDP or deflate the figures with an inflation index.
• Gross versus public: the series tracks gross federal debt, including intragovernmental holdings, so its ratio is higher than one based on debt held by the public.
• Revisions: GDP is revised after the fact, so a year’s debt-to-GDP value can shift slightly between data vintages even though the debt figure itself does not.
• Point-in-time snapshots: a fiscal-year-end figure captures one day, which cash balance and debt limit timing can make unusually high or low.

For a per-person estimate, divide debt by the population: hypothetically, $30 trillion divided among 330 million people is about $91,000 each.

Historical Data

All10Y

FAQs

The Bottom Line

Anyone comparing U.S. debt across years should look past raw dollar levels, which are nominal and grow on an ever larger base. Debt-to-GDP and percentage growth give fairer comparisons across decades. A single year's change can also reflect Treasury cash management, trust fund flows or debt limit timing around September 30, so it should not be read as that year's deficit or as one president's doing.