Public Debt Transactions (Table III-A)

Table III-A reports the gross issuance and redemption of U.S. Treasury securities each business day, split between marketable debt — Treasury bills, notes, bonds, TIPS, and floating-rate notes sold at auction — and nonmarketable debt such as savings bonds, State and Local Government Series (SLGS) securities, and Government Account Series (GAS) securities held by federal trust funds. The net of issues minus redemptions is the day’s change in total public debt outstanding.

The gross figures here are much larger than most people expect — often hundreds of billions of dollars a day — because Government Account Series securities held by trust funds like Social Security are rolled over constantly, and short-dated bills are refinanced week after week. Not all of these transactions move actual cash: Table III-B reconciles these gross debt figures to the cash the Treasury really raised or paid out, and Table III-C shows how the resulting debt total measures up against the statutory debt limit.