U.S. National Debt Calculator

Use this U.S. national debt calculator to estimate how much of the national debt is attributable to your state, household, taxpayer count, and per-person share using live Treasury data.

How this works: the U.S. Treasury publishes one national debt figure for the whole country — there is no official state-by-state debt, because the debt is owed federally. The state selector apportions that total using each state’s share of U.S. population, so the per-state figures below are estimates.

What is the National Debt of the United States of America?

The U.S. national debt is the sum of all money the U.S. federal government has borrowed to pay for spending that has trumped its revenue over its history. It does not equal the sum of each annual budget deficit (less surpluses, if there are any), but it’s the total of all of those deficits to date. The government borrows by issuing Treasury securities: bills, notes, bonds, and inflation-protected securities. When investors purchase them, they are lending money to the federal government that pays them interest.

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The debt is shown in two segments. The public’s holdings of debt consist of securities held by individuals, pension funds, mutual funds, banks, state and local governments, the Federal Reserve, and foreign governments. This is the part that represents real borrowing off the budget and is the more important of the two indicators of the economic burden of the debt. Intragovernmental holdings are securities that are held by government trust funds, including the Social Security trust fund. In essence, the government owes this money to itself, although it is a due to future retirees.

How Fast Is the Debt Growing?

The debt travels in a non-linear fashion. Its timing is unpredictable, as it moves up at days of large securities and also down at days of new securities issuance, and sometimes even it drops on days of tax receipts that exceed outlays. That’s why it’s important to look at a day’s pace individually, but to use the calculator above to calculate the average pace over the past six weeks or so, which helps to remove some of that noise. But the importance of the trend over time cannot be ignored: In most recent years, the debt has been growing much faster than the economy, hence the debt-to-GDP ratio is so central to the attention of economists and policy makers.

Why Interest Costs Matter

There’s a cost of borrowing. The government borrows money in the form of securities which are paid interest on, and this interest is now larger than the amount the government spends on defense. Interest is additionally among the quickest expanding portion of federal spending. Interest compounds, that is, the interest on the debt increases along with the amount of debt. As interest rates increase, so do the costs of new borrowing and the impact is cumulative over time as existing, lower-interest securities come to a close and are replaced. The “interest share” shown in the calculator is an estimate of the burden that’s spread out across the population.

Does Each State Owe a Share?

This is the most frequently asked question concerning state level debt numbers, and the simple answer is no — not in any official capacity. Only one number is used for the national debt, since the debt is a federal liability. For the same reason, there is no official estimate of “California’s debt” or “Texas’s debt,” since states do not borrow on the federal government’s behalf and are not responsible for the federal government’s debts.

These state figures are therefore not official, but rather an allocation. Total public debt outstanding is divided by each state’s population (based on the most recent estimates from the Census Bureau). It is an estimate, is transparent, easy to verify and politically without bias. The state with 12 per cent of the population is represented by 12 per cent of the debt. The calculator uses a variety of assumptions, including weighting by income, taxes paid, and economic output, all of which would produce different results, hence the use of estimates and not official figures.

How to Read This U.S. National Debt Calculator

Averages are national per-person, per-taxpayer and per-household. The national average is the same in every state simply because the state allocation is population weighted and, as a result, dividing by a population weighted denominator will yield a national average, not an error. The real state-specific numbers are the state’s portion of the debt, and its projected share of annual interest. All the figures are updated automatically every business day from the public Fiscal Data API of the Treasury and the chart enables comparisons of the debt’s trajectory over 1, 5 or 10 years.

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Sources: U.S. Department of the Treasury, Bureau of the Fiscal Service (Debt to the Penny, Monthly Treasury Statement) and the U.S. Census Bureau population estimates. This tool is for educational purposes and is not tax, investment, or financial advice.

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