How US Budget Deficits Have Lined Up With Bitcoin

The Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service publishes the Monthly Treasury Statement, a month-by-month account of federal receipts, outlays and the resulting surplus or deficit. The deficit is receipts minus outlays, so a deficit is the gap the government has to borrow to cover.¹ The federal fiscal year runs from October 1 to September 30; “FY2026” is October 2025 to September 2026. The September 2026 statement shows receipts of $5,403B, outlays of $7,396B and a deficit of $1,992B for the year, against $1,775B a year earlier.¹

The deficit is added to the national debt, which Treasury reports daily as “Debt to the Penny.” Total public debt outstanding was $37.6 trillion at the end of September 2025 and $40.2 trillion at the end of September 2026.² Debt does not rise by exactly the deficit: over FY2026 it rose $2.5 trillion against a deficit of $1.99 trillion, so the table shows both figures.²¹

The Treasury covers the gap by selling securities. On August 3, 2026 it estimated it would borrow $739 billion in privately held net marketable debt for July to September 2026 and $628 billion for October to December 2026.⁴ Its August 5 refunding statement offered $125 billion of 3-year, 10-year and 30-year securities and said the rest of the financing would come from regular bill auctions, cash management bills and monthly note, bond, inflation-protected and floating-rate auctions; it expected to keep coupon and floating-rate auction sizes unchanged for at least the next several quarters.⁴

Each row is one fiscal year. Bitcoin’s change is measured from the September 30 daily close before the fiscal year starts to the September 30 close that ends it, using UTC closes.³ Blockchain.com’s daily average price gives changes within 4 percentage points of these in every year.⁵ “Wider” and “Narrower” compare each year’s deficit with the year before. FY2015 is the first fiscal year the bitcoin data covers in full, because the daily data starts in September 2014.

The deficit was wider than the year before in 8 of the 12 fiscal years and narrower in 4.¹ Bitcoin’s September-to-September close was higher in 7 of the 8 wider-deficit years and in 2 of the 4 narrower-deficit years.³ The largest deficit, $3,132B in FY2020, came in the year ending September 30, 2020, when bitcoin rose 30%; in FY2026, with a deficit of $1,992B, it fell 27%, from $114,056 to $83,554.¹³

Twelve yearly points are a small sample, and each fiscal year also contains Fed decisions, inflation reports, ETF flows, halvings and other events that are tracked separately on Bittery (see bitcoin on Fed decision days and the US dollar and bitcoin). The table lines two sets of numbers up over the same dates. It does not show that one caused the other, and it says nothing about what comes next.