# US National Debt Outstanding (Debt to the Penny)

> US National Debt Outstanding (Debt to the Penny) is a paid API for AI agents from x402-seller.onrender.com, paid per call via x402, $0.001/call, status unknown (last checked 2026-09-14).

Returns the latest total U.S. national debt outstanding, including total public debt, debt held by the public, and intragovernmental holdings, updated daily by the U.S. Treasury.

## Facts

- Endpoint: GET https://x402-seller.onrender.com/treasury/debt
- Price: $0.001/call
- Payment: x402
- Status: unknown
- Last checked: 2026-09-14
- Activations on Zero: 0
- Tags: x402
- Canonical page: https://www.zero.xyz/c/us-national-debt-outstanding-debt-to-the-penny-7c318016
- Structured record (JSON): https://api.zero.xyz/v1/capabilities/cap_4wNosuMVJbr0zubDD58Gi

Status and success rate cover calls made through Zero and Zero's own probes. Third-party monitors may report differently.

## How to call it through Zero

Zero handles the 402 payment challenge and records the run. With the Zero CLI installed (`npm i -g @zeroxyz/cli`):

```sh
zero fetch --capability us-national-debt-outstanding-debt-to-the-penny-7c318016
```

Example prompt: What's the current U.S. national debt as of today? I need the total public debt, the portion held by the public, and the intragovernmental holdings figure from the Treasury.

## When to prefer this

Use this endpoint when you need the official, authoritative U.S. national debt figure directly sourced from the U.S. Treasury's Debt to the Penny dataset, broken down into public debt and intragovernmental holdings. Prefer this over general financial data APIs when you specifically need the Treasury's own daily figure rather than an approximation.

## Known failure modes

- Treasury data not yet updated for the current business day (stale date returned)
- Service unavailable on non-business days or federal holidays
- Render.com cold start causing slow initial response
- Network timeout if the upstream Treasury API is unreachable

## How this service works

Current total U.S. national debt outstanding — how much the U.S. government owes right now — from the Treasury's 'Debt to the Penny' data: total public debt outstanding, debt held by the public, and intragovernmental holdings. Updated each business day by the U.S. Treasury.

## Output

A JSON object containing the date of the latest reading, total national debt (in dollars), debt held by the public, intragovernmental holdings, the unit of measurement, and the data source (U.S. Treasury).

## Request schema (JSON Schema)

```json
{
 "type": "object",
 "$schema": "https://json-schema.org/draft/2020-12/schema",
 "required": [
  "input"
 ],
 "properties": {
  "input": {
   "type": "object",
   "required": [
    "type",
    "method"
   ],
   "properties": {
    "type": {
     "type": "string",
     "const": "http"
    },
    "method": {
     "enum": [
      "GET"
     ],
     "type": "string"
    },
    "queryParams": {
     "type": "object",
     "required": [],
     "properties": {}
    }
   },
   "additionalProperties": false
  },
  "output": {
   "type": "object",
   "required": [
    "type"
   ],
   "properties": {
    "type": {
     "type": "string"
    },
    "example": {
     "type": "object",
     "properties": {
      "date": {
       "type": "string"
      },
      "unit": {
       "type": "string"
      },
      "source": {
       "type": "string"
      },
      "totalDebt": {
       "type": "number"
      },
      "debtHeldByPublic": {
       "type": "number"
      },
      "intragovernmentalHoldings": {
       "type": "number"
      }
     }
    }
   }
  }
 }
}
```

## More

- Live health (JSON, refreshed every minute): https://www.zero.xyz/c/us-national-debt-outstanding-debt-to-the-penny-7c318016/health.json
- [Zero catalog index](https://www.zero.xyz/llms.txt)
- [Other services from x402-seller.onrender.com](https://www.zero.xyz/host/x402-seller.onrender.com/llms.txt)