World News
United States debt passes 40 trillion dollars for the first time
By Staff Writer | 20 August 2026
The Treasury's own daily statement put total public debt outstanding at 40.047 trillion dollars on Tuesday. The figure has slightly more than doubled in nine years and seven months.
The total public debt of the United States has passed 40 trillion dollars for the first time. The Treasury's published daily series recorded total public debt outstanding of 40,047,425,768,420 dollars and 22 cents on Tuesday 18 August, made up of 32,265,798,542,898 dollars of Treasury securities held by the public and 7,781,627,225,522 dollars of intra-governmental holdings. The last figure below the threshold was 39,986,657,878,071 dollars, recorded on the previous business day.
The same published series recorded 19,947,304,555,212 dollars on 20 January 2017. The debt is therefore now 2.008 times what it was then, a doubling that has taken nine years and seven months.
Where the increase falls
Read off the same series, the debt rose by 7.80 trillion dollars over the four years to January 2021, by a further 8.45 trillion over the four years to January 2025, and by 3.83 trillion since. Roughly a third of the whole increase since 2017 is attributed to the borrowing undertaken to fund the response to the coronavirus pandemic, which straddles two administrations; the remainder reflects tax and spending decisions taken either side of it.
Our federal programs spend much more than the government takes in, and the biggest-ticket items in the federal budget are all running on autopilot
Margaret Spellings, chief executive of the Bipartisan Policy Center
What it now costs to carry
About 1.1 trillion dollars a year goes on interest, a figure that rises as the pile grows and as rates climb. In the 2025 financial year the cost of servicing the debt exceeded defence funding for the first time. In the first ten months of the 2026 financial year it passed health programme outlays for the retired to become the second largest single line in the federal budget, behind the state pension system alone. Total federal spending runs at about 7 trillion dollars a year, and around 60 per cent of that is committed to programmes that grow automatically with the cost of living rather than being set each year.
The Treasury reported a deficit of 432 billion dollars for July, the fourth highest monthly figure on record, with customs receipts negative for a third consecutive month because of tariff refunds. The gap for the first ten months of the 2026 financial year already exceeds the total for the whole of 2025, with two months still to run.
The market has started to ask a price
An auction of 25 billion dollars of 30 year bonds cleared at the highest yield since 2021, and long dated yields reached their highest in nearly two decades on Tuesday as investors sought greater compensation for holding a growing supply. On Wednesday the Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, announced that buyback operations in 10 to 30 year paper would be doubled in size to at least 4 billion dollars each, a step intended to push long yields back down.
Foreign investors hold close to a third of all Treasury securities and their appetite has been falling over the past year, which leaves more of each issue to buyers who are sensitive to price and can make the market more volatile.
The Congressional Budget Office puts the additional debt arising from the current administration's main legislative package, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, at 4.7 trillion dollars.
The threshold was not crossed at a podium. It appeared in a routine daily statement of cash and debt balances, in a column of figures the department publishes every working afternoon.