Treasury has raised its borrowing estimate for the current quarter by $68bn to $739bn, and the table published with it puts the same quarter last year at $1,058bn

Seven hundred and thirty nine billion dollars.

That is what the Treasury said on Monday afternoon it expects to borrow in privately held net marketable debt between July and September, against the $671bn it published on 4 May. The department gives one reason and one offset: lower projected net cash flows, partially offset by a beginning-of-quarter cash balance that came in higher than it had assumed. Strip the cash balance out and the revision is bigger. On Treasury's own arithmetic the current estimate is $87bn above the May figure rather than $68bn.

The assumed end-of-September cash balance is unchanged at $950bn.

The comparison the announcement does not draw

Published alongside the release is a reconciliation table that runs back to the last quarter of 2021, and it is the more useful document of the two.

It puts marketable borrowing in the July to September quarter of 2025 at $1,058bn. The estimate for the same three months this year is $739bn. The difference is $319bn, which is arithmetic on the table rather than a figure Treasury states anywhere in the release.

The December quarter borrows less and needs more

Treasury expects to borrow $628bn between October and December, assuming an end-of-December cash balance of $850bn.

That is $111bn below the current quarter, and the table shows it does not come from a smaller deficit. The financing need for the December quarter is put at $646bn, above the $633bn now assumed for the September quarter. What changes is the cash balance. The table has it falling $100bn over the final three months of the year, against a rise of $31bn over the current quarter, and on the table's own identity the change in cash is the total of borrowing and other sources less the financing need.

One further column is worth reading. Redemptions from the System Open Market Account have printed zero on every row from January to March 2026 forward.

What the quarter just ended actually did

Treasury borrowed $190bn between April and June and closed the quarter with $919bn in cash. In May it had estimated $189bn and assumed a $900bn closing balance.

So the headline was almost exactly right and the composition was not. Excluding the higher closing balance, the release says actual borrowing came in $18bn below what was announced in May.

The financing details for the quarterly refunding, which is where auction sizes are set, are due at 8.30 a.m. on Wednesday 5 August.