Who actually owns the US national debt?

How to read this

The stacked area shows who holds the US national debt, bucket by bucket, every month from Mar 2000 to today. Toggle between “Share” (each band as a percent of the total) and “Absolute” ($ Trillions) — the first answers composition, the second answers scale. Toggle to the “By Country” view for the F1-style bar race of the top dozen foreign holders. Drag the scrubber to walk through history, hover to read exact values, click any annotation pin to jump.

What this is showing right now

Why the picture has changed

For most of the post-2000 era, foreign central banks were the marginal buyer of US debt. China climbed to a peak of $1.317T in November 2013, then began a long, slow retreat that continues today — much of it diversification into gold and other reserves, some of it reallocation through Belgium and the Caribbean financial centres. Japan briefly retook the number-one spot in 2019 and has held it since.

The Federal Reserve’s SOMA portfolio is the second biggest holder. It exploded in March 2020 (COVID QE doubled the stack), peaked in mid-2022 at roughly $5.7T of Treasuries, and has been gradually drawn down by the QT program since.

Watch the five domestic bands — money market funds, US banks, households, pensions, and state & local governments. As foreign appetite has flattened and the Fed has shrunk, those domestic sectors have had to absorb the new issuance. Money market funds in particular ramped sharply once the Fed’s reverse-repo facility began draining in 2023, and households (a Z.1 catch-all that also captures the basis-trade hedge funds nominally classified there) have steadily climbed. That domestic absorption is the single most important structural shift in the modern Treasury market.

Sources & caveats

• Federal Reserve (SOMA) — FRED WSHOMCB, weekly, resampled to last week-of-month.
• Foreign Official + Foreign Private + per-country — Treasury’s TIC Major Foreign Holders tables, monthly with a ~60-day publication lag.
• Total federal debt — FRED GFDEBTN, quarterly, forward-filled to monthly grid.
• Domestic split via Z.1 Flow of Funds. Money market funds, US banks, households, pensions, and state & local governments come from the Federal Reserve’s Z.1 release (Table L.210, Treasury Securities by Holder Sector — quarterly, forward-filled to monthly). Each band is sized as that sector’s share of the historical “total domestic ex-Fed ex-foreign” residual, so the eight bands continue to sum to GFDEBTN. Pensions combine private pension funds, federal government retirement, and state & local government employee DB plans.
• Caveat — Households is a Z.1 catch-all. The Z.1 households sector absorbs unclassified holdings as a residual, which historically includes mutual funds, ETFs, insurance companies, GSEs, broker-dealers, and large basis-trade hedge funds. Treat the “Households & other” band as the broader domestic non-bank / non-pension chunk rather than literal household savers.
• Caveat — Belgium & Cayman Islands. A large fraction of holdings reported under Belgium and Cayman are not local — Belgium is the home of Euroclear, the world’s biggest custodian, and Cayman hosts the legal shells of large basis-trade hedge funds. The country leaderboard is a custody snapshot, not a beneficial-ownership one.

Related charts

• The Firehose — where every Fed-created dollar ends up.
• Eurodollar Black Box — offshore-USD claims and funding stress.
• Net Liquidity Stack — Fed BS minus TGA minus RRP, vs the S&P 500.