Tool · US national debt
US debt clock
Treasury reported $40,054,421,967,787 of total public debt outstanding on 14 September 2026. The counter below starts there and projects forward at the trailing twelve-month rate.
US debt clock
The lighter digits are projected, not published.
Treasury reported $40,054,421,967,787 on 14 September 2026. Everything after that is projected at the trailing rate.
Anchored to Treasury's Debt to the Penny for 14 September 2026 and projected forward at the trailing twelve-month rate. The projection is a straight-line estimate, not a forecast: the debt moves in steps on settlement days rather than smoothly, and the rate itself changes.
Download the datasetEvery figure on the panel
What each number is, and where it comes from
A counter is only worth watching if you know what it is counting. Six figures sit on the panel above and they come from three different agencies on three different schedules, so they are not equally fresh and they do not all mean the same kind of thing.
| Figure | What it is | Source and cadence | Measured or projected |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total public debt | Every Treasury security in existence, including the fifth of it the government owes its own trust funds. | Treasury Debt to the Penny, every business day | Anchor measured, tail projected |
| Per person | The debt divided by the resident population. Arithmetic, not a liability anyone is billed for. | Bureau of Economic Analysis population, monthly | Same split as the debt |
| Per household | The same division against households rather than people, at the Census average of 2.51 per household. | Census Bureau average household size | Same split as the debt |
| Interest accrued | What carrying the debt has cost since the anchor date, counting up from zero rather than from a balance. | BEA national accounts, quarterly annual rate | Entirely projected |
| Debt to GDP | The debt against a year of economic output at the last published pace. The ratio that says whether the level is large for this economy. | BEA gross domestic product, quarterly | Live debt over a settled GDP |
| Interest a second | The annual interest bill divided by the seconds in a year. A unit of scale, not a payment schedule. | Derived from the BEA interest series | Derived |
The counter that matters most
Interest per second, and why it is the honest alarm
The federal government is paying about $39,516 a second to carry its debt, which is $1,247 billion a year on the national accounts basis for Q2 2026. That figure is not a payment leaving an account every second. Treasury pays coupons on a schedule, and the per-second number is the annual bill divided into seconds so the scale is legible.
It is the most useful number on this page because it is a flow rather than a stock. A debt of $40.05tn is hard to reason about and easy to dismiss. An interest bill competes directly with everything else the government buys, and it has now passed the defense budget: $1,247 billion against $1,198 billion for national defense, at annual rates in the same quarter and from the same table.
The part most commentary skips is the effective rate, which is interest actually paid divided by debt outstanding. It sits at 3.16% and it moves far more slowly than market yields, because a bond issued at 2% in 2020 keeps paying 2% until it matures. Most of the increase already in train is therefore mechanical: it arrives as old debt is refinanced at newer rates, over years rather than months. The same mechanism runs in reverse, which is how the 1990s brought the interest share down without a dollar being repaid.
The denominator nobody watches
Why the debt to GDP figure moves on its own
The panel shows the debt at about 123.3% of GDP. That ratio is the debt divided by a year of output at the pace of the last published quarter, and GDP is reported as a seasonally adjusted annual rate for exactly this reason: dividing a debt stock by a single quarter's production would report a ratio four times too large and it would still look like a number somebody meant to publish.
A large debt in a large economy is a different thing from a large debt in a small one, which is why the level on its own says very little. The ratio also moves for two reasons and only one of them is borrowing. It reached its record in mid 2020 because output collapsed at the same moment emergency borrowing arrived, so both halves moved the wrong way at once, and it then fell for two years as GDP recovered and inflation lifted the nominal denominator. Nothing was repaid in that period.
That is the mechanism behind the most common historical exit from a high ratio, which is nominal growth rather than repayment. It also means a falling ratio is not automatically good news and a rising one is not automatically new borrowing. If you are using this number as a fiscal scorecard, look at the two inputs separately, which is why both are published in the dataset and on the debt to GDP tracker.
How to read a debt clock
Most of these digits were never published
Treasury publishes the debt once a business day, to the penny. Every debt clock animates between those publications, and the animated digits are an estimate at some assumed rate. That is fine, and it is only misleading when the two are rendered identically, because a reader then has no way to tell the measured figure from the invented tail.
This one renders the projected digits in a lighter weight and puts the share that is projection on the panel. Immediately after a Treasury publication almost the whole figure is real. By the end of a long weekend a meaningful tail of it is not. The counter also moves smoothly, which the debt does not: it steps on settlement days, sits flat over weekends and holidays, and has fallen in some quarters.
The trailing twelve-month rate of +6.92% is a description of the last year, not a commitment to the next one. Borrowing is lumpy, it responds to the deficit and to refinancing, and a debt ceiling episode can freeze the headline figure for months while the underlying position keeps moving.
Published
The anchor figure, the date on it, the population divisor and the interest rate. Every one comes from Treasury or the Bureau of Economic Analysis and is in the dataset.
Projected
Everything the counter adds after the anchor date, at a constant rate the world does not actually follow. Useful for scale, not for a figure you would quote.
Not a personal debt
The per-person and per-household views are the debt divided by a headcount. Nobody is billed for a share, and the government is not a household with a mortgage.
Common questions
Debt clock questions
- Is this debt clock accurate?
- The anchor is exact and the tail is an estimate, and the panel tells you which is which. Treasury published $40,054,421,967,787 on 14 September 2026 and that figure is accurate to the penny. Everything the counter adds after it is a straight-line projection at the trailing twelve-month rate, rendered in a lighter weight, with the projected share shown on the panel.
- How much does the national debt grow per second?
- About $81,764 a second, which is the trailing twelve-month increase spread evenly across the year. The debt does not actually move smoothly. It steps on settlement days, sits flat over weekends and holidays, and has fallen outright in some quarters, so the per-second figure is a unit of scale rather than a description of what happens each second.
- How much interest does the US pay per second?
- About $39,516 a second, from an annual bill of $1,247 billion on the national accounts basis for Q2 2026. Treasury pays coupons on a schedule rather than continuously, so this is the annual figure divided into seconds to make the scale legible.
- What is the US debt to GDP ratio right now?
- About 123.3%, pairing the live debt with GDP for Q2 2026. GDP is published quarterly as a seasonally adjusted annual rate, so the ratio uses a year of output at the last published pace rather than a single quarter's production.
- Does every American owe this money?
- No. The per-person and per-household views divide the debt by a headcount and nothing more. No individual is liable for a share, nobody is billed, and the federal government is not a household with a mortgage. The figure is published because readers look for it and because showing the arithmetic openly is more useful than either hiding it or presenting it as a personal liability.
- Why do different debt clocks show different numbers?
- Three reasons. Some use gross debt and some use debt held by the public, which excludes the roughly one fifth the government owes its own trust funds. Some anchor to a different publication date. And most assume their own growth rate for the animated portion. This one uses gross debt, anchors to Treasury's last published business day, and states the rate it projects at.
The counter is the hook, the record is the argument
What the number actually means
A big number going up is memorable and it settles nothing. The debt is 123.3% of GDP, it has grown faster than the economy for sixty years, and the interest on it now runs above the defense budget. Each of those is a separate page with the full record and the dataset behind it.
Related
More national debt tools and trackers
Each one carries the full series, the primary sources and a dataset you can download.
Sources: US Treasury Bureau of the Fiscal Service Debt to the Penny, Bureau of Economic Analysis for GDP, population and the interest series, Census Bureau for average household size. Full dataset as CSV. Gold IRA Digest is an independent publisher and this page is information, not investment advice.