About this site

NationalDebtFacts tracks the US national debt in real time and puts it in context — per person, against the economy, against what the interest actually costs, and priced in assets no government can issue.

Why build this when a debt clock already exists

The well-known one is a remarkable piece of work and has been running for years. It is also nearly unreadable on a phone, explains none of its methodology, and answers no questions in words. It shows you hundreds of numbers and tells you nothing about them.

This site keeps the density that makes a debt clock feel serious, and adds the three things missing: a clear hierarchy so you know which number matters, a documented source for every figure, and plain-English answers to the questions people actually ask.

How it works

There is no server. The pages are static files, and your browser queries the US Treasury, the World Bank, CoinGecko and a metals price feed directly. Nothing is proxied through us, so nothing can be altered by us — and the site costs the same to run whether ten people visit or ten million.

The full chain, including which figures are live and which are estimates, is documented on the methodology page.

The news page is generated the same way: a script checks official sources twice a day and writes each item from a fixed template filled with the figures of the release, with a link to the source. No item is written by an AI model or rewritten from a news article.

Independence

This site is not affiliated with the US government, the Treasury, or usdebtclock.org. It takes no position on tax or spending policy. The figures come from official sources and are presented without adjustment; where interpretation is unavoidable, the reasoning is shown rather than hidden.

It is funded by advertising. Ads, where shown, are supplied by Google AdSense and labelled as such. No figure is sponsored, and no advertiser has any influence over what is published or how it is presented.

Corrections

If a number here is wrong, it should be fixed. Every figure is traceable to a named public dataset, so errors are checkable rather than matters of opinion.