Four hundred and fourteen months, four hundred and fourteen deficits

The American trade balance is argued about constantly and counted rarely. The monthly series on a balance of payments basis begins in January 1992 and has 414 observations to June 2026. Every single one of them is negative. This page reads that file end to end, gives the annual totals, the record month, the cumulative sum since 1992, and the release schedule that tells you how old the number is when it arrives — and states what the series does not contain, which is most of what people argue about.

The count, before any interpretation

The monthly balance on goods and services runs from January 1992 to June 2026 and contains 414 observations. The number of them that are positive is zero. Not one month in thirty-four and a half years recorded a surplus on goods and services.

Summed across the whole file to the end of 2025, the cumulative deficit is $16,203 billion— a little over sixteen trillion dollars over 408 months. That figure is a sum of nominal dollars from different decades and is offered as an arithmetic total of the published series, not as an economically meaningful aggregate; adding 1992 dollars to 2025 dollars is something the publisher does not do and this page flags rather than hides.

From −$39 billion in 1992 to −$932 billion in 2025 is a factor of about twenty-four in nominal terms. The series is not monotonic: 2019 was $22 billion better than 2018, and 2023 was $153 billionbetter than 2022 — the largest single-year improvement in the recent record — before 2024 and 2025 set new highs.

The months at the edges of the file

The four largest monthly deficits in the entire series are consecutive: December 2024, January, February and March 2025. Those four months alone total $471.6 billion, which is more than the whole of 1992 to 1996 combined. Whatever produced that cluster, the series records it as the most concentrated four months in thirty-four years, and by June 2026 the monthly figure was back to −$73,261 million, a little over half the March 2025 peak.

At the other end, the five smallest deficits in the file are all in 1992, the first year, and the smallest of them is −$831 million in February 1992. In that month the United States was within a thousand million dollars of balanced trade; the series has never come close since, and the closest month of the last twenty years is more than sixty times larger.

Four decades, and where the thresholds were first crossed

Averaging by decade removes the month-to-month noise and shows something the annual totals partly hide: the 2010s were, on average, better than the 2000s.

The average month deteriorated by a factor of 4.7 between the 1990s and the 2000s, then improved by about 9% in the 2010s, then deteriorated by 65% again in the 2020s. A single trend line drawn through this file would miss the fact that one of its four decades went the other way.

The thresholds are worth dating, because they establish when each level of deficit became normal. 317 of the 414 months are worse than −$25,000 million, and 128 are worse than −$50,000 million — the first of those being June 2004. Only 19months are worse than −$75,000 million, and only threeare worse than −$100,000 million: January, February and March 2025, the first ever recorded being January 2025at −$124,704 million. A level of deficit that had never occurred in thirty-three years occurred three times in one quarter.

How old the number is when it arrives

The Bureau of Economic Analysis publishes this release on a dated schedule, jointly with the Census Bureau, and the schedule read on 13 August 2026 shows the pattern precisely. The release for July 2026 is scheduled for 3 September 2026; August 2026 for 6 October; September 2026 for 4 November; October 2026 for 8 December. Each is at 8:30 in the morning.

The gap is about sixty-five days between the end of the month and the publication of its balance. On 13 August 2026 the newest available month was June 2026. There is no faster official measure of American trade, and no measure of the current month at all. A discussion of “the trade deficit” in August 2026 is a discussion of June at the earliest.

The related quarterly release, U.S. International Transactions and Investment Position, is scheduled for 24 September 2026 for the second quarter of 2026 and 18 December 2026 for the third. That is the release containing the current account, which is a different and broader measure, and its lag is longer still.

What this series cannot settle

Almost every claim made about the trade balance requires data this file does not contain, and it is worth being specific about which.

• It has no countries in it. This is a single aggregate. Bilateral balances are published separately and were not read for this page, so no statement about trade with any particular country appears here.
• It has no products in it. No commodity, sector or category detail was read, so nothing is said about what is imported or exported.
• It separates neither goods from services nor prices from volumes. A rise in the deficit can come from more imports or from dearer ones, and this series cannot distinguish them.
• It contains no employment, wage or output effect. Nothing read for this page connects the balance to jobs or growth, and no such connection is asserted.
• It has no policy in it. No tariff schedule, trade agreement or measure of any kind was opened, and none is named above.

What the file does establish, over its whole length and without interpretation, is narrow and hard to argue with: the United States has run a deficit on goods and services in every single month since January 1992, the annual total has grown roughly twenty-four-fold in nominal terms, it has fallen year on year twice in the recent record, and the four largest months on record are consecutive and end in March 2025.

Reading a trade number without being misled

• Ask which balance. Goods, services, or goods and services. They are three series and two of them are usually not the one being quoted.
• Ask which month. The newest available on 13 August 2026 described June, sixty-five days earlier.
• Ask whether it is the current account. That is quarterly, broader, and published later.
• Ask about the denominator. A nominal total across thirty-four years compares dollars of different sizes, and this page does not apply a denominator because it did not read one.

What these sources do not say

• No bilateral balances. This is a single aggregate; no country-level data were read and no statement about trade with any country appears here.
• No product or sector detail. The file contains one number a month.
• No separation of prices from volumes. A larger deficit can come from more imports or dearer ones, and this series cannot distinguish them.
• No employment, wage or growth effect. Nothing read for this page connects the balance to any of them.
• No tariff, agreement or policy measure was read, and none is named above.
• No denominator. The figures are nominal dollars, not shares of output, because no output denominator was read for this page.

How to verify this yourself

1. Download fredgraph.csv?id=BOPGSTB and count the rows. There should be 414, beginning January 1992.
2. Count how many of those values are above zero. The answer is none.
3. Sort the file and read the five smallest values. All five are in 1992.
4. Sort the other way and read the four largest. They are consecutive months ending March 2025.
5. Sum the values by calendar year. 2025 should come to about minus $932 billion.
6. Open the BEA release schedule and find the trade releases. Compare each date with the month it describes.

Where to go next on this site

• The dollar — the exchange rate side, measured over 4,906 twelve-month windows.
• What GDP is — where imports enter the national accounts, and how much the estimate moves afterwards.
• The economic calendar — the full schedule this release sits in, and how old each number is.
• All macroeconomics guides — the area index, one click away.

Sources opened for this page

Each source below was opened and read on 13 August 2026. Verified on 13 August 2026.

• Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis — FRED series BOPGSTB, trade balance on goods and services, balance of payments basisUsed for: all 414 monthly values from January 1992 to June 2026, the finding that none is positive, the annual totals from 1992 and from 2018 to 2025, the six months of 2026, the cumulative total of minus $16,203 billion to the end of 2025, the four largest months ending March 2025 at minus $132,983 million, and the smallest month of minus $831 million in February 1992. Read 13 August 2026.
• US Bureau of Economic Analysis — News release schedule, 2026Used for: the scheduled release dates of 3 September, 6 October, 4 November and 8 December 2026 for the July to October 2026 trade releases, the 8:30 am time, and the international transactions and investment position releases of 24 September and 18 December 2026. Read 13 August 2026.
• US Bureau of Economic Analysis — Gross Domestic Product, current release pageUsed for: the statement in the advance estimate for the second quarter of 2026 that imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP, increased, which is the only relation between trade and output read for this page. Read 13 August 2026.
• US Census Bureau — Economic Indicator Calendar pageUsed for: the published footnotes that where the 90% confidence interval includes zero the Bureau does not have sufficient statistical evidence to conclude that the actual change is different from zero, and that revised values are marked (r), both of which apply to the monthly indicators it publishes jointly with the BEA. Read 13 August 2026.

Change log

• 13 August 2026— page rewritten from scratch against the full FRED trade balance file, the BEA release schedule and current GDP release, and the Census indicator page, all opened that day. Removed from the previous version: bilateral deficit figures for named countries, taken from no source read; claims about jobs lost to trade, supported by nothing; the trade balance and the current account used interchangeably, when one is monthly and the other quarterly and broader; tariff figures with no schedule cited; and a trade deficit quoted with no month, at a time when the newest available data described June.

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