Total US federal debt outstanding, sourced directly from the US Treasury.
The total comes from the US Treasury’s Debt to the Penny dataset, which is updated once per business day — there is no real second-by-second feed. The number above ticks upward between updates using the average daily growth rate over the trailing ~90 days, so it’s a reasonable live estimate, not an exact real-time figure. It resets to the actual Treasury figure on each page load.
Per-citizen and per-taxpayer figures divide the total debt by a periodically updated US population estimate (342,000,000, US Census Bureau) and individual taxpayer estimate (161,000,000, IRS), not real-time counts.
This is total public debt outstanding as reported by the US Treasury — the sum of debt held by the public (bonds, bills, notes held by investors) and intragovernmental holdings (debt one part of the federal government owes another, like the Social Security trust fund).
The Treasury only publishes an official figure once per business day, so no source has true second-by-second data. This page shows the latest official figure, then estimates growth between updates using the recent average daily rate — clearly a projection, not a live feed.
Based on the trailing ~90 days of Treasury data, total debt has been growing by roughly $9,201,657,972 per day on average. This rate changes over time with government spending, revenue, and borrowing costs.