What the US Government Makes, Spends, Owns and Owes

One fiscal year as a single flow. Every dollar the government spent in fiscal 2025 came from one of the sources on the left, and every one of them went to one of the functions on the right; the two stacks are the same $7.19T. Taxes and other receipts cover the black, blue and green bands; the red band is what was borrowed to cover the rest. Hover a band or a ribbon for its share, and switch to the current fiscal year to date to see the same picture unfinished.

Fiscal 2025 (October 2024 to September 2025), from the September Monthly Treasury Statement. Both sides total $7.19T: gross outlays across every function that spent money. The borrowed band is the deficit, $1.78T, which is 25 cents of every dollar that went out. Net interest, in the rust colour, is the fourth-largest destination. The 2 functions the Treasury reports as negative for the year (undistributed offsetting receipts, -$150B; commerce and housing credit, -$29B) are collections that exceed spending, so they are carried on the inflow side as offsetting receipts, $179B, rather than drawn as a negative bar; that is what makes the two stacks equal rather than merely close. The 8 largest functions are named; the rest are folded into everything else.

Receipts by source for fiscal 2025, from the September Monthly Treasury Statement. Individual income taxes and the payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare are 84% of the total between them; corporate income taxes are 9%, and customs duties, $195B, are 5.6× their fiscal 2015 level.

Net outlays by function for fiscal 2025. Social Security, Medicare and the other health programs are 51% of the total. Net interest, highlighted, is $970B, the fourth-largest line, more than national defense ($917B). Undistributed offsetting receipts are negative and stay in the sum.

The eight largest functions in fiscal 2025 against the same lines in fiscal 2015, the first full year the Monthly Treasury Statement is on the Treasury’s API. Both columns are nominal dollars.

The Financial Report of the US Government is the audited accrual statement, the one an accountant would recognise. For fiscal 2025 it reported assets of $6.06T against liabilities of $47.78T: a net position of -$41.72T, with assets covering 13% of what is owed. Ten years earlier the net position was -$18.22T; it has widened by $23.50T since. The largest liability is the debt itself; the second is the pensions and health benefits already earned by federal employees and veterans, which the cash budget will not show until they are paid. The assets exclude land, natural resources, heritage assets and the power to tax, and the liabilities exclude future Social Security and Medicare benefits, which the report carries in a separate statement of social insurance. None of this is netted against the cash figures above; the two bases answer different questions.

The Statement of Net Cost is the accrual cost of running each part of the government in fiscal 2025: gross cost less the revenue the agency earns itself (postage, fees, premiums), 39 reporting entities in all. Across the government, $8.07T of gross cost less $752B of earned revenue is $7.34T of net cost. Interest on Treasury securities is a line of its own here, ranked against the departments.

The 15 largest of 39 reporting entities by net cost. Health and Human Services carries Medicare and Medicaid; the Social Security Administration the benefit payments; the Office of Personnel Management the civil-service pension accrual, which is why its net cost can swing with the discount rate rather than with anything it did that year. Accrual basis: a year’s cost includes benefits earned, not only cash paid.

This is arithmetic, not a forecast. Receipts grow at 4.9% a year, spending other than interest at 5.7% and nominal GDP at 5.3%, each its own compound rate over FY2015–FY2025. Interest each year is the Treasury’s latest average rate on its interest-bearing debt, 3.49% as of August 2026, applied to the prior year-end debt held by the public, and each year’s deficit is added to that debt. No recession, no tax change, no spending bill, no change in the rate. On those terms the fiscal 2035 deficit is $4.00T, 7.7% of GDP; net interest is $1.92T, 23% of receipts; and debt held by the public is 114% of GDP against 98% in fiscal 2025. The rate is the one input the market sets: a point higher puts the debt at 124% of GDP in fiscal 2035, a point lower at 105%. The Congressional Budget Office’s Long-Term Budget Outlook is the reference forecast; it models tax law, demographics and a rate path, and this page does not copy its figures.

Base case at 3.49%. Nominal dollars. Debt is debt held by the public, the part the Treasury pays net interest on; interest on the trust funds’ holdings is paid by one part of the government to another and nets out.