Corporate leases total $1.15tn. The SEC's own database says $2.14tn, and one filer is the difference

Two thousand one hundred and thirty-seven billion dollars. That is what the Securities and Exchange Commission's own structured-data service returns when asked for the total operating lease right-of-use asset carried by every company that reported one at the end of 2025.

The real figure is about $1,147bn. The gap is one oil and gas company in Fort Worth, whose annual report puts the number at $957,000 and whose next two quarterly reports put the same number, for the same date, at $957,000,000,000. The larger version is the one the machine reads.

That is a small story about one filer and a larger one about what a decade of lease accounting reform actually produced. ASC 842 was written to end the era in which a company could hold billions of dollars of lease obligations and disclose them in a footnote. It succeeded. The obligations are on the balance sheet, they are tagged, they are downloadable, and almost nobody has added them up.

What is ASC 842 and what did it actually require?

ASC 842 is the lease accounting standard the Financial Accounting Standards Board issued as Accounting Standards Update No. 2016-02 in February 2016. Its central requirement is one sentence long. At paragraph 842-20-25-1, in Section A of the Update: "At the commencement date, a lessee shall recognize a right-of-use asset and a lease liability."

Everything else follows from that. Under the previous standard, Topic 840, only capital leases reached the balance sheet, and the test for a capital lease was a set of bright lines that a well-advised lessee could stay on the right side of. Operating leases sat in the notes as a table of future minimum payments. A retailer with 900 stores showed rent expense on the income statement and a schedule of commitments at the back of the report, and nothing on the balance sheet at all.

The Update kept the two-way classification. What it removed was the option not to recognize. Both operating and finance leases now produce an asset and a liability, and the difference between them shows up in how the expense is patterned rather than in whether the obligation appears.

Two carve-outs matter for anyone trying to reconcile the numbers. Paragraph 842-20-25-2 lets a lessee elect, by class of underlying asset, not to recognize leases of 12 months or less. And paragraph 842-20-30-3 sets the discount rate: the rate implicit in the lease where it is readily determinable, the lessee's incremental borrowing rate where it is not, and, for entities that are not public business entities, a risk-free rate as a policy election.

When did ASC 842 take effect?

For public business entities, ASC 842 took effect for fiscal years beginning after 15 December 2018, so calendar-year filers first reported under it in their 2019 annual reports. Private companies were originally due in 2020, were deferred by ASU 2019-10 in November 2019, then deferred again by ASU 2020-05 in June 2020, landing at fiscal years beginning after 15 December 2021.

The deferrals are worth stating plainly because the standard is routinely described as a 2016 rule. It is, for public filers, a 2019 rule, and for everybody else a 2022 rule that arrived six years after the text was issued. ASU 2020-05 is explicit about the sequence in its own Basis for Conclusions at BC12 and BC13.

How much did ASC 842 actually put on corporate balance sheets?

Across every SEC filer reporting an operating lease right-of-use asset at a calendar year end, the aggregate was $952.79bn in 2019, the first year the standard applied to public companies, and $1,147.29bn at the end of 2025. The matching operating lease liability was $1,006.20bn in 2019 and $1,122.21bn in 2025. Roughly one trillion dollars, and it has grown 20.4 percent in six years.

Year end	Operating ROU asset	Operating lease liability	Finance lease liability	Filers reporting ROU	Median discount rate
2019	$952.79bn	$1,006.20bn	$127.58bn	4,351	5.000%
2020	$979.49bn	$942.22bn	$134.88bn	4,505	5.000%
2021	$1,029.93bn	$1,024.23bn	$140.89bn	4,766	4.830%
2022	$1,069.18bn	$1,072.48bn	$145.34bn	4,871	5.000%
2023	$1,071.82bn	$1,064.46bn	$149.04bn	4,706	5.500%
2024	$1,088.05bn	$1,046.81bn	$164.73bn	4,539	5.830%
2025	$1,147.29bn	$1,122.21bn	$211.91bn	4,258	6.000%

The population behind those totals is stable enough that the trend is real rather than arithmetic. Filers reporting total assets in the same frames fell from 6,180 to 6,075 over the seven years, a decline of 1.7 percent, against a 20.4 percent rise in the aggregate. Measured as a share of the total assets of the same matched companies, the right-of-use asset was 1.974 percent in 2019 and 1.723 percent in 2025. Leases grew. Everything else grew faster.

Where did the figure of trillions come from?

The trillions come from the International Accounting Standards Board, not from FASB, and they measure a different thing. The IFRS 16 Effects Analysis of January 2016 found that over 14,000 of about 30,000 listed companies disclosed off balance sheet leases totalling US$2.86 trillion of future payments, undiscounted, with a present value estimated at US$2.18 trillion.

Three things separate that from the US balance sheet number. It is global, and it covers companies reporting under IFRS as well as under US GAAP. It is undiscounted in its headline form, which is how a $2.18 trillion present value becomes an "almost $3 trillion" talking point. And it is a measure of the problem in 2016, not of the fix in 2026.

The concentration in the IASB's own analysis is the part that never travels. Of about 30,000 listed companies, 1,145 of them, 3.8 percent, accounted for US$1.83 trillion of the US$2.18 trillion present value. Lease accounting was never a broad-based reporting problem. It was a problem at airlines, retailers, restaurant groups and shipping companies, and the standard was rewritten for everybody to reach them.

FASB's own Basis for Conclusions runs to 152 pages and contains no dollar figure in trillions at all. What it contains, at BC3(a), is a citation: the SEC's 2005 Report and Recommendations Pursuant to Section 401(c) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 On Arrangements with Off-Balance Sheet Implications, mandated by and issued to Congress. The IASB's analysis reports that study's estimate as approximately US$1.25 trillion of off balance sheet leases at US public companies. That figure is stated here as what the IASB document says, because sec.gov refused every request for the report itself from this desk.

Why is the balance sheet number smaller than the footnote it replaced?

Because it measures a discounted amount over a remaining term and excludes short leases, while the old footnote measured undiscounted cash over the full remaining life. At the end of 2018, 3,357 filers disclosed $989.18bn of future minimum operating lease payments. In 2019, 4,351 filers carried $952.79bn of right-of-use asset. More companies, and less money.

This is the single most counterintuitive result in the whole exercise, and it is not an error. Three mechanisms drive it. Discounting removes the time value from a stream of payments that often runs a decade. The policy election at 842-20-25-2 lets short leases stay off entirely. And the old table included payments under leases that had not yet commenced, which the new asset does not.

The handover is visible in the data as a cliff. Filers tagging the old footnote element went from 3,357 at the end of 2018 to 737 at the end of 2019, and the amount they disclosed fell from $989.18bn to $72.29bn, as the disclosure moved from the notes to the face of the balance sheet.

So the popular framing, that ASC 842 moved trillions onto corporate balance sheets, gets the direction right and the magnitude wrong in both dimensions. The US number is about a trillion, not three, and the arrival of that trillion on the balance sheet coincided with the disappearance of a slightly larger number from the notes.

What does the discount rate do to the reported figure?

It moves it, quietly, in the opposite direction to interest rates. The median weighted-average discount rate filers disclose fell to 4.830 percent in 2021 and has risen every year since, reaching 6.000 percent in 2025. The interquartile range widened with it: 3.50 to 6.50 percent in 2021, 4.68 to 7.74 percent in 2025.

A lease liability is the present value of the remaining payments. Raise the discount rate by 1.17 percentage points and the same contractual payments produce a smaller liability. That is the mechanism at 842-20-30-3 working exactly as written, and it means the reported balance is a rate-sensitive measure of a set of obligations that are not themselves rate-sensitive at all.

Nobody on the first page of results for this subject mentions it. The consequence is that between 2021 and 2025 the operating lease liability rose 9.6 percent, from $1,024.23bn to $1,122.21bn, in a period when the discount applied to it increased by more than a fifth. The underlying lease book grew by more than the balance sheet says.

What is actually growing in the lease numbers now?

Finance leases, and the growth is concentrated to a degree that is hard to overstate. Aggregate finance lease liability rose from $127.58bn in 2019 to $211.91bn in 2025, and $60.15bn of the 2025 total sits at one company. Microsoft alone is 28.4 percent of the finance lease liability of all 1,267 filers reporting one.

Microsoft's own record is a straight line upward: $27.15bn at 30 June 2024, $46.17bn at 30 June 2025 and $66.59bn at 30 June 2026, on figures its annual and quarterly reports agree on at every overlapping date. That is a 145.3 percent increase across two fiscal years.

The operating side carries the same signature at a smaller scale. CoreWeave reported an operating lease right-of-use asset of $2.59bn at the end of 2024, $8.23bn at the end of 2025 and $16.60bn at 30 June 2026, a rise of 541 percent in 18 months. Amazon, the largest single holder of operating lease right-of-use assets at $86.05bn, added $9.91bn in a year.

A standard written in 2016 to make store leases and aircraft leases visible is now, in its largest moving parts, a live readout of the data centre build. The same shift shows up in the electricity those buildings draw and in the water they are said to consume, and it is the lease line that puts a dollar figure and a counterparty behind it.

Can the machine-readable version be trusted?

Mostly, and not entirely, and the failures are large enough to matter. Of the 200 largest filers in the 2025 frame, which are 70.07 percent of the total, 150 match their own annual report exactly, 2 do not, and 48 have no annual-report fact at that date. But the unscreened aggregate the SEC's API returns for 2025 is $2,137.3bn, and 44.8 percent of it is one fact.

That fact belongs to HighPeak Energy. Its Form 10-K, accession 0001437749-26-007770, filed 11 March 2026 for the period ended 31 December 2025, reports an operating lease right-of-use asset of $957,000. Two subsequent quarterly reports, filed 6 May and 10 August 2026, report $957,000,000,000 for the same date and the same element. The adjacent quarters in the same series read $1,200,000, $728,000 and $499,000. The company's total assets are $3,213,714,000. This piece does not characterize how the difference arose and reports only what the filings say.

The second failure is structural rather than clerical, and it is the more instructive one. General Motors reports $1,000,000,000 of operating lease right-of-use asset in its annual report for 31 December 2025 and $33,686,000,000 against the same element in its quarterly reports for the same date. There is no ambiguity about which is which, because the same annual report carries $33,686,000,000 against the element for property subject to or available for operating lease, which is the lessor side: GM Financial's vehicles out on lease to customers. One element, two filings, two different things measured.

The frames service takes the most recent filed fact, so until the next annual report lands the aggregate carries the quarterly figure. That is a $32.7bn difference in a $1.15tn total from a single well-known issuer, and it is why the most recent year in any series built this way should be read as provisional.

Method

Every total here was computed from the SEC's XBRL frames API by summing the calendar-year-end instantaneous frame for each element, with two screens. The first excludes any filer whose lease balance exceeds its own total assets in the same frame, which is arithmetically impossible and removes between zero and thirteen filers a year. The second checks the 200 largest filers in the 2025 frame against their own company records and prefers the annual-report value where the two disagree, which is applied only to General Motors, the sole material case. Both screens are stated in full in the file, and both underlying tables are published above as CSV.

The limits are worth naming. Frames carry one fact per entity per period and require the standard element, so a filer using an extension tag is invisible to this count. The 2025 frame is the least mature of the seven and will be revised. And screen two was run on 200 companies, not on 4,258, which is 70.07 percent of the money and 4.7 percent of the filers.

What it changes

If you are reading a lease disclosure, the number on the balance sheet is not the number in the old footnote and cannot be compared to it. It is discounted, it excludes leases of 12 months or less, and it moves when the discount rate moves even if the lease book does not.

If you are pulling this data yourself, screen it. One filer's fact is 44.8 percent of the published 2025 aggregate, and it clears no automated check because nothing in the taxonomy says a right-of-use asset cannot be 298 times a company's total assets.

And if you are trying to work out what companies are committing to, the operating lease line is no longer where the movement is. The growth is in finance leases, it is concentrated in a handful of technology companies, and at Microsoft it has more than doubled in two years.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between ASC 842 and Topic 840? Topic 840 required only capital leases on the balance sheet and left operating leases in a footnote table of future minimum payments. ASC 842 requires a right-of-use asset and a lease liability for both operating and finance leases, subject to a policy election for leases of 12 months or less at paragraph 842-20-25-2.

When was ASC 842 effective for private companies? Fiscal years beginning after 15 December 2021, with interim periods within fiscal years beginning after 15 December 2022. That date is the product of two deferrals, by ASU 2019-10 in November 2019 and ASU 2020-05 in June 2020, from an original date of fiscal years beginning after 15 December 2019.

What discount rate is used under ASC 842? The rate implicit in the lease where it is readily determinable, otherwise the lessee's incremental borrowing rate. An entity that is not a public business entity may elect a risk-free rate instead. Across SEC filers the median weighted-average rate disclosed was 6.000 percent at the end of 2025.

Did ASC 842 really move trillions onto balance sheets? Not in the United States on the balance sheet measure. SEC filers carried $952.79bn of operating lease right-of-use asset in 2019 and $1,147.29bn at the end of 2025. The trillions figure is the IASB's January 2016 estimate of undiscounted off balance sheet lease commitments at listed companies worldwide, US$2.86 trillion, with a present value estimated at US$2.18 trillion.

Which companies carry the largest lease balances? At the end of 2025 the largest operating lease right-of-use assets among SEC filers were Amazon at $86.05bn, T-Mobile at $25.69bn, Microsoft at $25.10bn, Verizon at $23.50bn and MGM Resorts at $23.00bn. On the finance lease side Microsoft alone accounts for $60.15bn of a $211.91bn total.