# Monthly Treasury Statement The official monthly scoreboard of federal finances — receipts, outlays, and the surplus or deficit, on a modified cash basis, published by the [[Bureau of the Fiscal Service]] about a week into each following month. When news reports "the deficit hit $X through May," this is the source. The MTS is where the cash that trickled through the [[Daily Treasury Statement]] gets organized into the categories budget analysis actually uses: outlays by agency and by budget function, receipts by source, and the means of financing — including the off-budget entities (see [[On-Budget vs Off-Budget]]). ## The tables that matter - **Table 5 — outlays by agency** is the vault's cash-basis source of record for the agency spending tables on the [[Federal Budget FY2025]]-series pages: what each department actually paid out, not what it was appropriated (the distinction at [[Outlays vs Budget Authority]]). - **Outlays by function** feeds the [[Budget Functions]] view — spending by national purpose rather than by org chart. - **The September issue** doubles as the fiscal year's final report card; the full dataset is on the open Fiscal Data API (`fiscaldata.treasury.gov`). ## CBO's estimate vs. Treasury's actual — a worked example The [[Congressional Budget Office]] publishes its *Monthly Budget Review* a few days **ahead of** the MTS, estimating the month Treasury has not yet reported. That makes the MBR an estimate and the MTS the settlement — which raises the fair question of whether citing the MBR first is sloppy. **July 2026 answers it:** | Source | Published | July 2026 deficit | |---|---|--:| | CBO, *Monthly Budget Review* | Aug 10, 2026 | $431B | | Treasury, *Monthly Treasury Statement* | Aug 12, 2026 | $432B | **A spread of about 0.2%.** CBO is working from the same [[Daily Treasury Statement]] cash flows Treasury is about to formalize, so the MBR is a near-complete tally, not a forecast. The practical rule this page endorses: **cite the MBR for the headline number as soon as it lands, and the MTS for anything table-level** — outlays by agency (Table 5), outlays by function, receipts by source — because those breakdowns exist only in the MTS. Where the two ever diverge by more than rounding, the MTS wins. One caveat the July figures also illustrate: **timing shifts move money between months, not between years.** Payments normally due Aug 1 landed in July, inflating the month's $431B to a figure that was **$333B** on a shift-adjusted basis. Both numbers are correct; they answer different questions. See [[Budget Gimmicks]] for the version of this that is done on purpose. ## The RWKB angle The MTS is the **Spent** column of the vault's three-column [[The Spending Gap]] lens — the authoritative "what actually left the [[Treasury General Account]]" number that gets diffed against what Congress authorized and what [[Apportionment]] released. Rhetoric about cuts and savings is checked against this ledger ([[DOGE Claimed vs Verified Savings]] is built on exactly that diff), and it is the planned Phase 2 data source for the vault's weekly spending-delta tooling. Where the DTS detects disruptions daily, the MTS settles arguments monthly. ## Related - [[Daily Treasury Statement]] · [[Bureau of the Fiscal Service]] · [[Outlays vs Budget Authority]] - [[Budget Functions]] · [[Budget Hub]] · [[The Spending Gap]] · [[How Federal Money Moves]]