Monthly Budget Review: Summary for Fiscal Year 2024

In fiscal year 2024, which ended on September 30, the federal budget deficit totaled $1.8 trillion—an increase of $138 billion (or 8 percent) from the shortfall recorded in the previous year. Revenues and outlays alike increased from 2023 totals: Revenues rose by 11 percent, or $479 billion, and outlays increased by 10 percent, or $617 billion. Revenues in all major categories, but notably individual income taxes, were greater than they were in fiscal year 2023. The largest increase in outlays was for education ($309 billion). Net outlays for interest on the public debt rose by $239 billion (or 34 percent) to a total of $949 billion. Those amounts differ only slightly from the amounts CBO estimated and discussed in last month’s Monthly Budget Review.

In 2024, the deficit was equal to 6.4 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP), an increase from 6.2 percent of GDP in 2023. The 2024 deficit as a share of GDP is greater than the 50-year average of 3.8 percent and has been exceeded only six times since 1946 (from 2009 through 2012 and in 2020 and 2021). Compared with the size of the economy, federal debt held by the public also increased in 2024—rising to 97.8 percent of GDP from 96.0 percent of GDP at the end of fiscal year 2023.

Outlays in fiscal years 2023 and 2024 were affected because October 1 (the first day of the fiscal year) fell on a weekend in each of those years. As a result, certain payments were shifted into the prior fiscal year—$64 billion from 2023 into 2022 and $75 billion from 2024 into 2023. If not for those shifts, the deficit in 2024 would have been 13 percent larger—instead of 8 percent larger—than it was in 2023.

The 2023 deficit of $1.7 trillion would have been larger if not for the recording of budgetary effects related to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn a plan the Administration announced in 2022 to cancel many borrowers’ outstanding student loans. If those effects, and the effects of timing shifts, were excluded for fiscal year 2023, the deficit for that year would have been $2.0 trillion instead of $1.7 trillion. Thus, without the savings related to the unwinding of the proposed debt cancellation (and excluding the effects of timing shifts in 2023 and 2024), CBO estimates that the federal deficit would have been $106 billion smaller in 2024 than in 2023.

The deficit in 2024 was $82 billion (or 4 percent), smaller than the shortfall estimated in CBO’s most recent baseline budgetary projections, which were issued in June 2024. Revenues were greater than CBO projected in that baseline—by $29 billion (or 1 percent) and outlays were less than projected, by $53 billion (or 1 percent).