Two official figures for federal spending, $1.7 trillion apart
American Factbook Research
Figures as of
In fiscal year 2025 the federal government reported $5.30 trillion of obligations on federal awards, and the Treasury reported $7.01 trillion of outlays. Both numbers are official, current, and published by the same department. They are $1.71 trillion apart — a difference of 32.2%.
Neither is wrong, and the gap is not an error anyone needs to resolve. It is what happens when two questions that sound identical are not.
The gap is a feature, not an event
Across the 11 complete fiscal years where both figures exist — fiscal year 2015 to fiscal year 2025 — outlays exceeded award obligations in 11 of them. The ratio has never fallen below 1.22 and never risen above 1.37.
A difference that holds in every year of the record is a property of the two measures. It is not something that happened.
What each number is
An obligation is a binding commitment to pay, recorded when the award is made. USAspending collects them from agencies, award by award, which is what makes it possible to say who received the money and where the work was performed.
An outlay is money leaving the Treasury, recorded when it leaves. The Monthly Treasury Statement collects them from the government's own accounts, which is what makes it possible to say what the deficit was.
Two differences follow, and both matter.
They describe different moments. A commitment made in one year is often paid across several, so a year's outlays settle commitments from several years and a year's obligations will be paid in several more. In any one year the two will differ even if nothing else did.
They also cover different things. USAspending's figure is obligations on federal awards. Treasury's is everything the government paid, including federal salaries, interest on the debt, and transfers that are not awards at all. Some of the distance above is that, and not timing. The record here does not separate the two causes, and this brief does not claim to.
Why this hub reports both
A site that picked one number and called it federal spending would be choosing which question to answer without telling the reader it had chosen. The entity pages here are built on obligations, because that is the measure that names a recipient, a place and an industry. The national pages are built on outlays, because that is the measure that reconciles to the deficit.
Where a page shows both, it says which is which, and it does not present the difference as a discrepancy.
What this cannot show
- The two figures do not cover the same universe. USAspending's total is obligations on federal awards — contracts, grants, direct payments, loans, insurance. Treasury's outlays cover everything the government paid, including federal salaries, interest on the debt, and transfers that are not awards. Some of the distance between them is that difference and not a timing difference.
- The two figures also do not describe the same moment. An obligation is recorded when a commitment is made; an outlay when money leaves. A commitment made in one year can be paid across several, and a payment in one year can settle a commitment made earlier.
- Neither publisher is reporting the other's measure incorrectly. Both figures are published as what they are, and the difference is not an error in either.
- Both series are revised after publication, and a figure is only as current as the snapshot it was drawn from.
- The most recent fiscal year is excluded from every comparison here, because it is not over on either side.
Sources
- USAspending API v2, U.S. Department of the Treasury, Bureau of the Fiscal Service. U.S. Government work, public domain (17 U.S.C. 105). Retrieved 2026-09-19.
- Treasury Fiscal Data — Monthly Treasury Statement, U.S. Department of the Treasury, Bureau of the Fiscal Service. U.S. Government work, public domain (17 U.S.C. 105). Retrieved 2026-09-19.
Every figure above is the recorded result of a query checked into the repository alongside this text. Continuous integration re-runs those queries and refuses the change if a number here and a number there disagree. Read the methodology, or the datasets behind it.
Published by American Factbook LLC. An independent publication.