U.S. national debt Running estimate3
The U.S. national debt was $40,260,641,972,390.03 as of October 1, 2026, the last official figure.
Checking U.S. Treasury Fiscal Data for the latest figure. Until it answers, the clock runs from the figure of October 1, 2026.
The clock runs up. $CLOCK pays it down.
A live clock of the U.S. national debt, run on the Treasury's own numbers. Beside it, a token on Robinhood Chain whose fees are paid to the U.S. Treasury to reduce that debt, with every payment receipted here in public.
Read the board.
Every figure here comes from a public source, numbered and named at the bottom of the page. The clock does the arithmetic. You do the wincing.
Per person
The last official figure divided by 341,784,857 people, the Census Bureau's estimate of the U.S. population on July 1, 2025. Newborns included.2
Added since December 31, 2025
From $38.51 trillion at the close of December 31, 2025 to $40.26 trillion on October 1, 2026. And the year is not over.1
Clock speed
That is $75,995 a second, or $4.56 million a minute: the average daily change over the past 12 months of records, and the speed this clock runs at.3
Who it is owed to
The public: investors, banks, the Federal Reserve and other countries. The rest is owed to the government's own trust funds, such as Social Security's.1
Every gift to reduce it, FY 2026
Americans gave the Treasury $548,497 to reduce the debt in fiscal 2026, through July 2026. At the clock's speed, that covers 7.2 seconds.4
Five trillion at a time.
The debt at the end of every fiscal year since Debt to the Penny began in 1993. It took 12 years to go from $5 trillion to $10 trillion. The last $5 trillion took about two.
See the figures
| Fiscal year end | Debt |
|---|
First crossed
At the clock's speed, $45 trillion arrives around September 2028. That is arithmetic, not a forecast.
How $CLOCK pays it down.
Four steps. Each one leaves a public record, so nobody has to take our word for anything.
-
Trade
$CLOCK trades on Pons, a launchpad on Robinhood Chain. Every buy and sell carries a creator fee, collected onchain.
-
Claim
The project claims those fees from the token's contract. Each claim is a transaction anyone can look up.
-
Pay
The fees are turned into dollars and paid to the U.S. Treasury on Pay.gov, as Gifts to Reduce the Public Debt.
-
Post
Each payment goes on the receipts below with its Pay.gov tracking ID, the receipt and the claim it came from. The second counter goes up.
The fine print, in large print.
Buying $CLOCK is not a donation, and it is not tax deductible. It is a token, and tokens can lose all their value. Payments to the Treasury come from trading fees, are made by the project, and start after launch. Nothing here promises a return.
The receipts.
The second counter, itemized. Every payment to the Treasury gets a line, with the paperwork attached and the totals added up for you.
Gifts to Reduce the Public Debt, via Pay.gov
| Date | Amount | Pay.gov tracking ID | Receipt | Fee claim |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The first payment posts after launch. | ||||
Check any line. The tracking ID matches the Pay.gov receipt, and the fee claim links to the transaction on Robinhood Chain. Our payments are also part of the Treasury's own monthly total of gifts, published on Fiscal Data.4
$CLOCK.
The details, as they are. Anything that is not live yet says so.
- Name
- The Debt Clock
- Ticker
- $CLOCK
- Chain
- Robinhood Chain (chain ID 4663)
- Launchpad
- Pons
- Contract
- Posts at launch.
- Fees to the Treasury
- Posts at launch.
- Trade
- Posts at launch.
- X
- Posts at launch.
- Telegram
- Posts at launch.
Straight answers.
If it is not answered here, it is probably answered by the receipts.
Is this a government website?
No. The Debt Clock is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or officially connected with the U.S. government or the U.S. Department of the Treasury, or with any other debt clock. It reads the Treasury's public data, the same data anyone can download.
Is buying $CLOCK a donation?
No. Buying $CLOCK is buying a token. It is not a donation, it is not a gift to the Treasury, and it is not tax deductible. Payments to the Treasury are made by the project, from trading fees.
Where does the money go?
To the U.S. Treasury, through the Gifts to Reduce the Public Debt form on Pay.gov. Under 31 U.S.C. 3113, gifts made this way can only be used to pay down the public debt. The Treasury publishes the monthly total of all such gifts on Fiscal Data.
How does the clock count?
It starts from the last official figure in the Treasury's Debt to the Penny, at the end of its record date, and moves at the average daily change of the past 12 months of records. Between official figures it is an estimate. When the Treasury posts a new figure, the clock resets to it. The real debt moves in lumps, not in a smooth line.
Can a token really pay down $40 trillion?
Not by itself, and we will not pretend otherwise. At the clock's speed, a $1 million payment covers about 13 seconds. The point is a public, checkable record of every dollar sent, next to a clock that makes the scale hard to look away from.
Will $CLOCK go up?
Nobody can promise that, and we do not. $CLOCK comes with no promise of returns and no price target. Tokens can lose all their value, so only buy what you can afford to lose. Nothing here is investment advice.
How can I check a payment?
Every line on the receipts has the date, the amount, the Pay.gov tracking ID and the receipt itself, plus a link to the fee claim on Robinhood Chain's block explorer. If a line is missing any of that, ask us about it in public.
Sources and method.
Where every number on this page comes from, and how the clock does its arithmetic.
- The national debt. Total public debt outstanding, from Debt to the Penny, U.S. Treasury Fiscal Data. The page loads it from api.fiscaldata.treasury.gov when it opens and checks again every 30 minutes. The Treasury posts each business day's figure, usually on the next business day. The page also ships with the figures of October 1, 2026, in case the live call fails.
- Population. 341,784,857, the U.S. resident population on July 1, 2025, from the Census Bureau's Vintage 2025 estimates, released January 27, 2026. Per-person figures divide the last official debt figure by it.
- The running estimate. The clock starts from the last official figure at midnight Eastern at the end of its record date. It then adds the average daily change over the past 12 months of records: the latest figure minus the figure from one year earlier, divided by the days between. Right now that is $6,565,979,369 a day. It is an estimate between official figures, not an official number.
- Gifts. Gift Contributions to Reduce the Debt Held by the Public, U.S. Treasury Fiscal Data, monthly. The fiscal-year figure adds up the months published so far. The program itself is Gifts to Reduce the Public Debt on Pay.gov, under 31 U.S.C. 3113.
- History. Fiscal-year figures are the last Debt to the Penny record on or before September 30 of each year. Milestones are the first record at or above each $5 trillion. The $45 trillion date is the running estimate carried forward, nothing more.
- Our payments. Read from receipts.json on this site. Each line is one Pay.gov payment. The totals are added up from it every time the page loads, so they cannot drift from the lines above them.