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Gross federal debt at the close of every fiscal year since 1790, on a logarithmic scale — each gridline is a hundred times the one below it. The scale is the point: on an ordinary axis the first two centuries lie flat on the floor, which makes the debt look like a modern invention. It is not. What is modern is that the jumps stopped being wars.
Treasury publishes this as one continuous series, but the reporting date moves with the fiscal year: 1 January through 1842, 30 June to 1976, 30 September since 1977. The year label is the fiscal year in each era. Gross debt includes what the government owes its own trust funds — see the split below.
The headline number is gross debt. About a fifth of it is money the government owes itself — mostly Social Security and Medicare trust funds that were required by law to lend their surpluses to the Treasury. That is a real promise to future beneficiaries, but it is not a claim by an outside lender, which is why the two measures sit 24 points of GDP apart.
Most arguments about the debt are arguments about which of these someone means. They are different quantities, and two of them are the same fact measured two ways.
What the government spends in a fiscal year minus what it collects. In FY2025 it spent $7.011 trillion and collected $5.236 trillion, so the deficit was $1.775 trillion. A deficit is a flow — it happens once and is over.
The accumulated total of every deficit ever run, minus every surplus, plus the interest. A deficit is this year; the debt is all the years. This is why cutting the deficit does not cut the debt — it only slows the rate at which the debt grows.
$32.34 trillion of Treasury securities held by households, pension funds, banks, foreign governments and the Federal Reserve. This is the number economists and CBO use, because it is the part that competes for real savings and carries real interest.
The remaining $7.76 trillion, mostly Social Security and Medicare trust funds that were required by law to lend their surpluses to the Treasury. It is a real obligation to future beneficiaries but not a claim by any outside lender — which is why gross debt (122.6% of GDP) and public debt (98.1%) are so far apart.
A statutory ceiling on total borrowing, set separately from the spending and tax laws that make the borrowing necessary. Raising it authorises no new spending; refusing to raise it does not cancel any. It is the only mechanism of its kind in a major democracy, and it is distinct from a shutdown — a shutdown is a failure to appropriate, the ceiling is a failure to finance what was appropriated.
Gross interest is everything the Treasury pays, including to its own trust funds ($970 billion in FY2025). Net interest subtracts what it pays itself ($952 billion, CBO). Both are correct; a comparison that mixes them is not.