UK national debt and debt interest costs since 1995

Dyddiad y datganiad:
9 October 2025

FOI reference: FOI-2025-3132

You asked

Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, I am requesting disclosure of the following information relating to the United Kingdom's national debt and debt interest costs, covering the last 30 financial years (from 1995/96 onwards).

I specifically request:

Annual Gilt Issuance and Stock

  • Face value of gilts issued each year, broken down by type (conventional vs index-linked) and maturity.
  • Outstanding gilt stock at year-end, by type.

Annual Treasury Bill Issuance and Stock

  • Value of Treasury bills issued each year, and outstanding stock at year-end.

National Savings & Investments (NS&I)

  • Annual inflows/outflows and outstanding stock at year-end.

Annual Debt Interest Costs - Full Breakdown

Please provide the debt interest cost for each year, itemised into the following components:

(a) Cash coupon payments on gilts and Treasury bills.

(b) Index-linked gilt capital uplift (non-cash accruals).

(c) Interest paid on Bank of England reserves / Asset Purchase Facility (APF) transfers indemnified by HM Treasury.

(d) Any other category used in calculating the published "debt interest" total.

Methodology Documents

Any internal or published methodology used to classify the above components as "debt interest" in the public finances.

We said

Thank you for your request.

Debt stock

The Debt Management Office are responsible for debt and cash management for the UK Government. They publish extensive information on the UK gilt and treasury bill market. 

Specifically, they publish data covering: 

The public sector finances publish a time series of the National Savings and Investments stock as a component of central government gross debt. We do not publish data for the associated flow. 

We present gilts, treasury bills and NS&I as components of general government gross debt and consequently public sector net debt in tables PSA8A and PSA8B in Appendix A to the monthly PSF release.

Debt interest

Unfortunately, we cannot identify (and therefore do not hold) the cash coupon payments on gilts and Treasury bills within our dataset. Instead, these payments are supplied to us as a component of wider aggregates within the central government net cash requirement. 

The public sector finances publish the debt interest payable by central government, of which we publish the capital uplift on index linked gilts.  

We publish both the interest receivable by the Asset Purchase Facility Fund on their gilt holdings and the interest payable on the reserves created to fund the loan from Bank of England to the Asset Purchase Facility Fund in table PSA9B of Appendix A. 

Please see the associated download which provides a summary breakdown of the larger components of central government interest payable covering the contribution of NS&I, gilts and Network Rail.

Methodology Documentation 

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