Getting Started on Fiscal Data

While there is a long history of publishing U.S. government financial reports for the public, these reports were often on various websites and weren’t always in a format that allowed users to easily analyze or understand them. Fiscal Data adds metadata to help you understand the data better and has converted all the data into a format that allows both people and computers to analyze the data.

To explore or analyze the data, click on the Dataset Search option in the navigation at the top of the page. If you know the specific report or dataset you’re interested in, you can search for it in the search bar. If you’re just interested in exploring, using the Topics filter is a great way to discover new datasets.

If you would rather learn more about federal finances without diving directly into the data yourself, check out any of our explainers or insights. Our explainers use charts and other visualizations to explain topics like debt, federal spending, or savings bonds, while our shorter insights pages provide a quick view into a topic like the cost of maintaining the debt.