Interest on the federal debt passed $1 trillion in fiscal 2026, a record

Political Guyentist · October 18, 20261 min read

The federal government paid $1.05 trillion in net interest (interest paid minus interest earned) in fiscal 2026, up 8% from $970 billion, about 19.5% of the $5.40 trillion in revenue, Bloomberg reported Saturday, Oct. 17, from the same Treasury statement behind the Oct. 16 $1.99 trillion deficit. Interest is now the third federal cost above $1 trillion a year, after Social Security and Medicare.

Baseline: interest took 6.9% of revenue in 2015; its old record, 18.4%, was set in 1991 and passed in fiscal 2025, per Econofact.
Watch: more than $10 trillion of publicly held debt matures within 12 months and must be refinanced at today's rates, Fortune reports, with the 10-year yield above 5%.

What we’re less sure of2 of 6 claims

Medium
Net interest was about 19.4% of fiscal 2026 revenue, topping the previous record of 18.5% set in fiscal 2025.
The desk computed the share from receipts reported by ecmsource. The record comparison relies on a single Econofact brief. The story does not attribute the calculation.
Medium
Interest now joins Social Security and Medicare as the third federal cost above $1 trillion a year.
This is the desk's unattributed framing. It is plausible from public outlay data, but no source in the story states it, and Medicare clears $1 trillion only on a gross basis.