Where is our money going?

What the money pays for

The year’s spending by budget function, the purpose each dollar served whichever agency paid it out. These are the Treasury’s net outlays: money paid out, less money that came back to the same programs.

Social Security alone took 22.5 cents of every dollar spent. The six largest functions took 87.7 cents.

How it was paid for

Every dollar spent came either from receipts, taxes above all, or from borrowing: the Treasury sells bonds, notes and bills to cover what receipts do not. Receipts and borrowing together are exactly what was spent.

Individual income taxes paid 37.9 cents of every dollar spent; borrowing paid 25.3 cents.

Which agencies spend it

The same net outlays by the agency that paid them out, as the Treasury lists them. A department’s figure is what it paid, less what its programs took back in (Medicare premiums, student loan repayments) and less what it paid to other federal accounts, which is counted once where it is finally spent.

Every bureau and account, as the Treasury lists them →

What kind of payment it is

Every agency reports what each dollar bought, by the object class of the payment: a benefit, a grant, a salary, a contract. These are the agencies’ own reports to USAspending, summed: gross outlays, before collections are netted out and counting interest the Treasury pays the government’s own trust funds, so they add to $9.50T rather than the $7.01T spent. Money moved from one federal account to another ($315.4B) is left out, because it is counted again where it is finally paid.

Here and abroad

Foreign aid is every dollar of economic and military assistance to other countries and to international programs, as the agencies that give it report it to ForeignAssistance.gov: disbursements, the money actually paid out in the year.

Foreign aid was $47.8B in fiscal year 2025, 0.7 cents of every dollar spent, to 183 countries and to regional and worldwide programs. The other $6.96T is everything else the government spent.

Where the most aid went

$54.7B in federal contracts and grants was also committed for work performed outside the United States: bases, embassies, and the aid above where it was awarded as a contract or grant. It overlaps foreign aid and is not added to it.

All foreign aid: every country, purpose, agency and account →

Where the money lands at home

Every contract, grant, loan and direct payment by the state where the work is done or the money is received, from the agencies’ reports to USAspending. These are award obligations, the amounts committed in the year: Social Security is here, counted where the people who receive it live, but agencies’ own salaries and operations are not, and neither is interest on the debt. The states and territories carry $5.24T of the $5.25T awarded at home; $10.1B has no state recorded.

Without Medicare, federal awards come to $11,760 a person across the country. A state high on the per-person list usually has a large military presence, big defense contractors or national laboratories; open a state to see which.

Who receives it

The same awards by the kind of award and by who received them. Payments to people, Social Security and Medicare above all, are published only as totals by county to protect their privacy, so $3.04T (57.4% of all award money) has no recipient’s name. The largest named recipients are state health and social services departments, which pass Medicaid on to hospitals and doctors, then the large contractors.

A recipient here is one registered entity as USAspending records it; a company’s subsidiaries are separate rows. Names are as filed.

The largest programs

Grants, loans and direct payments by the federal program they were paid under, each with its assistance listing number (the old CFDA number). Contracts belong to no program and are not in this list. These 100 programs account for $4.38T of the $5.30T awarded.

Over time

Spending and receipts in each fiscal year since 2015, from the Treasury’s September statements. The gap between the two columns is the year’s deficit, and fiscal years 2020 and 2021 are the pandemic.

The 2025-dollar column restates each year with the consumer price index (CPI-U) annual average of the calendar year the fiscal year ends in. Each budget function’s own page has its figures year by year.