What the government is borrowing

Where the borrowing came from

Net new borrowing in September 2026, split by what was sold. A minus number means that part of the curve shrank while the total may still have grown.

• Bills −$130bn
• Notes +$112bn
• Bonds +$25bn

The three parts add up to +$7.3bn of net borrowing, exactly. Every dollar Treasury raised at auction is a bill, a note or a bond, so nothing is left over.

Is borrowing going up or down?

Treasury plans in quarters, not months, and it announces those plans four times a year. So compare a quarter against the one before it. A single big month tells you very little on its own. These are the refunding quarters Treasury itself uses: February to April, May to July, August to October, November to January. A quarter only appears once all three of its months are complete.

The quarter running now is Aug-Oct 2026, and 2 of its 3 months are in. Borrowing so far is $387bn, against $724bn across the whole of May-Jul 2026. It joins the table above once Aug-Oct 2026 is complete.

The next announcement is due in November 2026. It sets the auction sizes for the quarter after it, so it is the point at which a change in the trend above usually becomes visible.

What Treasury did with the cash

Money raised does not disappear. It lands in Treasury's account at the Federal Reserve and is spent from there, so borrowing and spending both run through that one balance. When it rises, cash has left the banking system for an account at the Fed. When it falls, that cash comes back.

This is the balance itself, which is a level and not a monthly flow, so it keeps its own chart and its own scale. The month to month move in it is a flow, and that one sits on the borrowing chart above as cash move, where it can be read against what was raised.

How this gets read in the Treasury market

Bonds are priced by supply and demand like anything else. Put more of them in front of the same buyers and the price falls, which means the yield rises. That is the whole mechanism.

The total borrowed matters less than where on the curve it is raised. Money raised in bills lands on the part of the curve the Fed controls most directly, and the money market usually absorbs it without much fuss. The same money raised in bonds lands where buyers are fewer and far pickier, so a shift toward long-dated supply is felt much more than the same shift in bills. Watch the split on the chart above rather than the headline number.

Auction sizes change at the quarterly refunding announcement, so that is when the supply picture actually moves. The surprise is what does the work. A raise that was expected is already in the price, and a raise nobody had pencilled in is the one that moves yields.

The cash balance works on liquidity rather than supply. When Treasury raises money and leaves it at the Fed, that cash has come out of the banking system. When it runs the balance down, it goes back in. Two quarters with identical issuance can pull in opposite directions depending on what happened to that account, which is why it is on this page at all.

You can follow the individual auctions and how each one was received on the auctions pages, what the market expects from the Fed on the rate path, and where the curve actually sits on rates.

This describes how the market reads these figures. It is not advice, and none of it says what anything is going to do next.

The numbers

The last two years, month by month. Net figures are signed, so a minus is a month Treasury paid debt down.

Questions

Take it with you

Everything here is every issuance series with gross, net and the cash balance behind them at api.helious.io/v1/treasury-issuance, and as the get_treasury_issuance tool on api.helious.io/mcp. The individual auction results live on the auctions pages, and what the market is paying for rates is on the rate path.