How has the national debt grown over the past three decades, across five presidents and six terms, and how does that growth line up with GDP, unemployment and inflation? Treasury publishes the count every business day, so here it is, every day since April 1993, with the laws and events that bent the curve and how long each trillion took.
Nominal dollars. Shaded columns are presidential terms, gold marks are milestones. Drag the strip below the chart to zoom.
Start and end are the first Treasury reading on or after each inauguration. Context, not attribution: deficits reflect laws, recessions and interest costs that span administrations.
Days between the first crossing of one whole trillion and the next. Shorter bars mean faster borrowing.
Debt is total public debt outstanding: debt held by the public plus intragovernmental holdings (mostly trust funds such as Social Security), in nominal dollars, from Treasury's daily Debt to the Penny series, which begins April 1, 1993. The breakdown by holder starts September 1997. GDP is nominal gross domestic product from the Bureau of Economic Analysis via FRED, quarterly at a seasonally adjusted annual rate, drawn through quarter midpoints. Debt-to-GDP divides each day's debt by that interpolated GDP; at quarter ends it matches FRED's published ratio. After the latest quarter () GDP is held at its last value, so the most recent ratio readings are provisional. Snapshot retrieved .
Comparison panels: Debt-to-GDP is described above. The others use monthly data from FRED: U-3 unemployment (seasonally adjusted), CPI-U inflation (12-month change, not seasonally adjusted) and the effective federal funds rate (monthly average, a policy rate rather than Treasury's borrowing cost). Each panel has its own axis; nothing here shares a scale with the debt. Unemployment and inflation have no October 2025 value: the federal shutdown of October 1 to November 12, 2025 stopped BLS data collection for that month, and the agency later confirmed those figures would not be published. The lines break there rather than bridging the gap.
The live ticker is an estimate. It takes the average change per second over the 90 days before Treasury's latest reading and runs it forward. The log scale turns constant percentage growth into a straight line, which is the honest way to compare growth rates across decades. Zoomed-in linear views under six years fit the axis to the data and say so; wider views start at zero. Presidential terms and events are context, not causes.