Deep Dive: Who owns the debt, from foreign governments to the Federal Reserve

The foreign share, holder by holder

About three tenths of the cash interest Treasury pays goes abroad, according to the Ledger research records, because a large block of Treasury securities sits outside the United States. Foreign holdings totaled 9.25 trillion dollars in July 2026, per Treasury International Capital data compiled in the research file. The largest single foreign holder was Japan at 1.104 trillion dollars, followed by the United Kingdom at 998 billion dollars and mainland China at 618 billion dollars.

Those three holders together account for about 2.72 trillion dollars of the foreign total. The rest is spread across many other countries, funds, and investors. The detail most summaries skip is that the foreign share is a minority of the whole: against a total debt of $40,388,317,675,071.91, most Treasury securities are held inside the United States. Foreign demand still matters at the margin, because Treasury auctions sell new securities every week and overseas buyers are a regular part of that bidding.

The domestic holders, and where the interest goes

Domestic holders listed in the research records include mutual funds, banks, money market funds, pension funds, insurers, and households buying directly through TreasuryDirect. The Federal Reserve holds 4.49 trillion dollars in Treasury securities. The research file notes that the Federal Reserve currently remits nothing back to the Treasury on those holdings because of past losses, a reversal of the long standing pattern in which its earnings flowed back to the government.

Interest is the cash that connects the holders to the budget. Treasury paid $609,200,000,000 in cash interest in fiscal 2025, per the Daily Treasury Statement line for interest on Treasury securities, an average of about $50,766,666,667 per month. Every holder on the list above, foreign and domestic, receives that interest on the payment dates for the securities they hold. Yesterday the Ledger profiled a single department. Tomorrow the rotation continues with the next data theme, and followers get each holder figure with its vintage label attached, never blended into a single undated total.

Data vintage: Foreign holdings dated July 2026, Treasury International Capital, as compiled in the Ledger money trail research file pulled October 7, 2026. Cash interest dated fiscal 2025, Daily Treasury Statement dated September 30, 2025. Debt total dated October 15, 2026, pulled October 18, 2026.

Sources

1. U.S. Department of the Treasury, Fiscal Data, Debt to the Penny dataset: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/debt-to-the-penny/debt-to-the-penny

2. U.S. Department of the Treasury, Fiscal Data, Daily Treasury Statement dataset: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/daily-treasury-statement/daily-treasury-statement