Data as of Aug 21, 2026.

Buying a Treasury is lending money to the US government for a set period at a set rate. Hold it to maturity and you receive exactly what the schedule says. Sell it early and you receive whatever the market will pay that day, which can be more or less than you put in.

Three things to know before you read a number in this table. Each row is a published series, not a bond for sale — several of these are averages across hundreds of bonds, and an average is not a price anyone will fill you at. The Basis column says what each row measures, and rows measured differently are not comparable with one another however close the numbers look. And the Observed column dates the reading: NOT CURRENT means the publisher is overdue and the figure shown is the last one they released, not today's. The note under the table says which rows belong to this category and which are here only as a benchmark to measure it against.

Two conventions in one table, and the Basis column says which is which. The DGS rows are constant-maturity yields compiled by the US Treasury; the DTB rows are the same bills quoted on a discount basis, from the Federal Reserve's H.15 release. Both reach us through FRED. A constant-maturity yield is interpolated across actual issues, so it is a benchmark rather than a bond you can buy at that exact number.

Right now the 3-month bill reads 3.88% as a constant-maturity yield (FRED DGS3MO) and 3.72% as a discount rate (FRED DTB3, the series on the Cash Rates page) — a difference of 0.16 percentage points on the same instrument on the same day. That gap is the convention, not a market move and not an error on either page.

Why this section sits between the rates and the risks rather than at the end: two bonds quoting the same number do not pay you the same amount. Bond interest is generally taxed as ordinary income federally, at your own marginal rate, and what differs between the families is whether your state also taxes it and whether any federal exemption applies. A headline yield is a before-tax figure everywhere on this site, so the comparison that matters to you is the one made after the paragraphs below.

A fund is how most people end up owning this category, and it is not the same instrument as the bonds inside it. The yield column here counts the cash already paid out over the last year against today's share price, so it describes what has happened rather than what the holdings are contracted to earn — the two can differ by a wide margin in either direction. The other difference is the one people notice late: an individual bond has a date on which it repays, and a fund does not. It keeps selling and rebuying, so there is no maturity to wait for if the price falls.

Most people arrive at bonds expecting the only question to be whether the borrower pays. The list below is the answer to a different question: the ways the money shrinks while every payment arrives exactly on schedule. Prices fall when new bonds pay more than yours, inflation can outrun a fixed payment, and a borrower who repays early hands the cash back at the worst moment to reinvest it. Read these before the yield, not after it.

• Interest-rate riskYields up, prices down. The longer the remaining term, the larger the price move for the same change in yield — that sensitivity is what duration measures. A 30-year bond can move several times as much as a 2-year on the same news.
• Inflation riskThe coupon is fixed in dollars, not in purchasing power. If inflation runs above the yield you locked in, the income still arrives on schedule and still buys less than you expected.
• Reinvestment riskShort bills protect you from price swings by maturing quickly, and then hand the problem back: you have to redeploy the cash at whatever rate exists on that day.
• Selling before maturityHold-to-maturity guarantees the schedule. Selling early converts a paper price move into a realised one, and a forced sale in a rising-rate market is where most Treasury losses actually come from.
• Fund versus bondA Treasury ETF never matures. It rolls its holdings, so there is no date on which you are made whole at par — the price is simply the price.