U.S. federal interest paid, fiscal 2025
about $1.2 trillion
FY2025 · claim US-INTEREST-FY2025 · edition 2026-09-14-v1
- Exact value
- 1,200,000,000,000 USD
- Perimeter
Interest over a fiscal year: a flow, not another balance to add to the debt stock.
- What this measures
- Interest paid on the federal debt during fiscal year 2025 — a flow of money over twelve months.
- What it does not measure
- A debt balance, an addition to the debt, or another publisher's net-interest measure.
- As published
- 1.2 USD trillions (normalized ×1000000000000 to reach the exact value above)
- Caveat
- About $1.2 trillion of interest paid during fiscal year 2025 — a flow of money across twelve months, not a debt stock, not an amount owed at any instant, and not an increment to the debt. It is not the same as net interest, and the measure it is most likely to be confused with is in the same audit: GAO reports interest expense on debt held by the public at about $1.0 trillion for the same year. Two figures, one report, different perimeters. It can never be a component of any total on this site.
- Display step
- 100,000,000,000 — the precision this figure is shown at
- Review status
- Recorded against the publisher's own cited location. The source's consolidation status below says whether that page was retrieved during consolidation or an earlier review was preserved.
Publisher
- FY2025 and FY2024 Schedules of Federal Debt audit
GAO. GAO-26-107908; January 20, 2026; Fast Facts: $37.6tn debt at September 30, 2025 and $1.2tn FY2025 interest.
Fiscal year 2025; report issued January 20, 2026. Status as of 2026-09-13.
Retrieved again from the publisher on that date. Federal gross debt counts debt held by the public and debt the government owes to its own accounts, so it is not consolidated general-government debt. The interest figure is a year's payments, not an addition to the debt.
Cite this figure
U.S. federal interest paid, fiscal 2025, about $1.2 trillion, FY2025. GAO, FY2025 and FY2024 Schedules of Federal Debt audit, status as of 2026-09-13. Planet IOU, edition 2026-09-14-v1, https://planetiou.jonathanrreed.com/sources/US-INTEREST-FY2025/
This claim is a dated observation, not a live figure. It is never updated in place: a newer reading is a new edition with its own page. See methodology for how amounts are normalized and corrections for anything that has changed.