Working notes: foreign holdings of US Treasury securities

<h1>Working notes: foreign holdings of US Treasury securities</h1>
<p>Compiled by Money &amp; World, 2026-07-24. Every figure below was read from the
primary source named, not from a summary of it (Newsroom Rulebook section 2a).</p>
<h2>Holdings by country</h2>
<p>Source: US Treasury, Treasury International Capital (TIC) system, Table 5,
&quot;Major Foreign Holders of Treasury Securities.&quot;</p>
<ul>
<li>Machine-readable table: https://ticdata.treasury.gov/Publish/slt_table5.txt</li>
<li>Landing page: https://home.treasury.gov/data/treasury-international-capital-tic-system-home-page/tic-forms-instructions/securities-major-foreign-holders-of-treasury-securities</li>
</ul>
<p>The May 2026 data were released on July 14, 2026. Columns used are <code>2026-05</code>
(latest reported month) and <code>2025-05</code> (twelve months earlier). Figures are in
billions of US dollars, holdings at end of period.</p>
<p>Consistency check: the twenty named countries plus the &quot;All other&quot; line sum to
9,371.1, which equals the reported foreign grand total for May 2026. The May
2025 column reconciles to 9,021.7 the same way.</p>
<p>Note on the older monthly file <code>mfhhis01.txt</code>: as of this compile it was frozen
at December 2025 and did not carry 2026 months. The current data live in
<code>slt_table5.txt</code> and in the monthly TIC press release. We used the current file.</p>
<h2>Custodial caveat (Treasury's own words)</h2>
<p>From the note printed under every TIC release
(https://home.treasury.gov/data/treasury-international-capital-tic-system):
the data are collected primarily from US custodians and broker-dealers, so a
security held in a third-country custodial account is attributed to the custodian
country, not the owner. Treasury states it is &quot;difficult to draw precise
conclusions from TIC data about changes in the foreign holdings of U.S. financial
assets by individual countries.&quot; An annual survey of Foreign Portfolio Holdings
of US Securities reassigns holdings to the country of the beneficial owner and is
the fuller measure.</p>
<h2>Denominators (share of the debt)</h2>
<p>Source: US Treasury, Bureau of the Fiscal Service, &quot;Debt to the Penny.&quot;
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/debt-to-the-penny/debt-to-the-penny</p>
<p>Matched to the last business day of May 2026 (2026-05-29):</p>
<ul>
<li>Total public debt outstanding: $39,207.76bn ($39.21tn)</li>
<li>Debt held by the public: $31,515.37bn ($31.52tn)</li>
<li>Intragovernmental holdings: $7,692.39bn ($7.69tn)</li>
</ul>
<p>Foreign share of total public debt: 9,371.1 / 39,207.76 = 23.9 percent.
Foreign share of debt held by the public: 9,371.1 / 31,515.37 = 29.7 percent.</p>
<p>Historical comparison (2019-12-31, same dataset):</p>
<ul>
<li>Total public debt: $23,201.38bn; debt held by the public: $17,170.44bn.</li>
<li>Foreign holdings that month (TIC): $6,844.2bn.</li>
<li>Foreign share of debt held by the public then: 6,844.2 / 17,170.44 = 39.9 percent.</li>
</ul>
<p>Change since end-2019: foreign holdings +37 percent ($6.84tn to $9.37tn); total
public debt +69 percent ($23.2tn to $39.21tn). The debt outgrew foreign holdings,
so the foreign share fell.</p>
<h2>Official versus private</h2>
<p>From Table 5, &quot;Of which: Foreign Official&quot;:</p>
<ul>
<li>May 2026: $3,848.0bn, which is 41.1 percent of the $9,371.1bn foreign total.</li>
<li>May 2025: $3,877.1bn.</li>
<li>Official holdings fell $29.1bn over the year while the total rose $349.4bn, so
all net foreign buying came from the private side.</li>
</ul>
<h2>Federal Reserve holdings (domestic context)</h2>
<p>Source: Federal Reserve H.4.1 balance sheet, &quot;Securities held outright: U.S.
Treasury securities,&quot; via FRED series TREAST.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TREAST</p>
<ul>
<li>Week of 2026-05-27: $4,461.9bn ($4.46tn), the value used for the May comparison.</li>
<li>Latest at compile (2026-07-22): $4,515.7bn.</li>
</ul>
<p>The Fed's Treasury holdings exceed the entire foreign official sector ($3.85tn)
and exceed Japan, the United Kingdom and China combined ($2.75tn).</p>
<h2>Crossovers in the ranking (verified from the monthly table)</h2>
<ul>
<li>Japan passed China as the largest foreign holder in June 2019 (Japan 1,122.8
vs China 1,112.5).</li>
<li>The United Kingdom passed China for second place in March 2025 (UK 779.2 vs
China 765.4).</li>
</ul>
<h2>Corroborating analysis (not the source of any figure above)</h2>
<p>Congressional Research Service, &quot;Foreign Holdings of Federal Debt,&quot; RS22331,
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/RS22331 — the recurring analysis built on
this same Treasury data, useful for the survey-versus-monthly distinction.</p>