National Debt — research checked 2026-10-17
Annual source: Treasury Historical Debt Outstanding API, /v2/accounting/od/debt_outstanding; 97 annual records 1930–2026. Early milestones retain exact source dates and values. Annual change uses Decimal subtraction of consecutive annual records, including 1929 baseline. CSV retains cents. Display uses two decimal places in trillions/billions/millions.
Latest: Debt to the Penny API, /v2/accounting/od/debt_to_penny; requested records no later than 2026-10-17; latest returned 2026-10-15. Public holdings plus intragovernmental holdings reconcile exactly to total.
GDP ratio: FY2027 OMB Table 7.1, published April 3, 2026, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2027-TAB/xls/BUDGET-2027-TAB-8-1.xlsx ; column I (public-held debt as percentage of GDP). Actual years 1940–2025 only. Missing ratios are null/blank, rendered Not available. Ratios are NOT calculated from the Treasury total-debt column. OMB coverage and accounting differs from Treasury; the two dollar series are not spliced.
Dates: Treasury annual snapshots at or near June 30, 1930–1976; at or near September 30, 1977 onward. Some records use nearby business days; exact dates are preserved. No separate 1976 transition-quarter row exists in this annual Treasury series; 1977 debt change covers 15 months and is flagged.
Political context: President on record date, not election winner or president at calendar-year end. Thus 1963 is Kennedy and 1974 is Nixon. House and Senate historical party-division pages provide chamber-control history. 1931 House is Not yet organized, rather than labeling Democrats before organization in December. Senate 2001 and 2002 September snapshots are Democratic, including independent caucus/tie-breaking arrangements as relevant. These are control labels, not raw seat majorities or causal allocation of debt.
Historical milestones are selected, not a continuous early annual series. The January 1, 1835 value is preserved ($33,733.05); Treasury describes payoff of all interest-bearing debt that year. No missing debt values are represented as zero.
Static HTML contains all annual records without JavaScript. JavaScript only filters rows. No live data request or API key is needed. New source releases require a deliberate page update.