This interactive workbook allows users to see how revenues and outlays that differed from those in CBO's January 2025 baseline budget projections would increase or decrease net interest costs and thus affect deficits and debt.
Summary
The interactive table in this workbook allows users to see approximations of how revenues and outlays that differed from those in the Congressional Budget Office’s January 2025 baseline budget projections would increase or decrease net interest costs and, in turn, affect deficits and debt. Such changes in net outlays for interest are often referred to as debt service.
The interactive debt-service worksheet is designed to generate results that approximate the estimates that CBO would produce using its methods and model for projecting debt-service costs when updating its baseline projections to incorporate changes in revenues or outlays. The results generated by the worksheet do not constitute an official CBO estimate. Moreover, debt-service costs are not normally included in CBO’s cost estimates.
In CBO’s baseline projections, which typically extend 10 years into the future, net outlays for interest are calculated by estimating the amount of debt that the Treasury would need to issue to finance government operations and the interest rates that it would pay on that debt. The interest rates underlying this interactive worksheet are from CBO’s January 2025 economic forecast. Projections of two of those rates are reproduced in a separate table in the workbook.