This comparison is for FX traders, quant developers, and analysts who want US Treasury data in code (yields, federal cash, debt, and auction results) and are deciding whether to call the US Treasury's Fiscal Data API and yield-curve feed directly or use FXMacroData. Both routes end at the same official Treasury numbers; the question is which fits the job.
The short answer: the Fiscal Data API is free, keyless, commercially reusable, and covers datasets FXMacroData does not carry, including the Daily Treasury Statement cash balance and full auction results. FXMacroData reads the same official Treasury par yield curve and Debt to the Penny data and adds what an FX workflow needs around them: one schema for Treasury yields and other countries' government yields, release-timed macro data, a release calendar, an MCP server, and pair context for USD/JPY and EUR/USD.
Decision snapshot
Choose Treasury's own APIs when
You need Treasury General Account cash, daily debt, auction results with bidder detail, average interest rates, or the official reporting rates of exchange, all free and without a key.
Choose FXMacroData when
Treasury yields are one input in an FX model that also needs CPI, payrolls, policy rates, and other countries' curves in the same shape, with release timestamps and AI access.
Fast verdict
Treasury is the free source of record for federal finance. FXMacroData is the cross-currency layer that FX automation runs on. Liquidity-focused desks often use both.
Takeaway: "how much cash does the Treasury hold?" is a Fiscal Data question. "How do US yields compare with Japan's, and what release could move USD/JPY next?" is an FXMacroData question.
Pricing And Access
There is no price to compare in the usual sense. The Fiscal Data API at api.fiscaldata.treasury.gov is open: its documentation states that it does not require a user account or registration for a token. Treasury's daily par yield curve rates are published on home.treasury.gov as web tables with CSV downloads and an XML feed, also free and without registration. Neither source lists a paid tier.
FXMacroData has an Always Free tier with no key: USD data only, 100 requests per day, and USD announcements delayed 15 minutes. That tier already includes the US Treasury par yields, from the 1-month bill to the 30-year bond. The Individual plan is $50/month or $500/year with a 14-day trial and 1,000,000 requests per month (bursts of 300 per minute and 5,000 per hour, 20 concurrent). Business is $250/month or $2,500/year for companies and teams of up to 10 people, with the same allowance and priority support. Enterprise is by custom agreement.
Fiscal Data API
Free, no key*
JSON, CSV, or XML; up to 10,000 rows per page; no published rate limit.
Treasury yield curve feed
Free, no key*
Daily par, real, bill, and long-term rates as tables, CSV, and XML.
FXMacroData Always Free
$0, no key
USD only, including Treasury yields; 100 requests/day; announcements delayed 15 minutes.
FXMacroData Individual
$50/month
22 currencies, real-time releases, 1,000,000 requests/month, 14-day trial.
Takeaway: for US-only Treasury data the official sources cost nothing, and FXMacroData's free tier covers US yields too. You pay FXMacroData for the other 21 currencies, release-time delivery, and the integration work you no longer maintain.
Side-By-Side Comparison
| Attribute | US Treasury Fiscal Data API and yield feed | FXMacroData |
|---|---|---|
| Core job | Official federal finance data: cash, debt, auctions, reporting exchange rates; yield curves on home.treasury.gov. | Release-timed FX macro data across 22 currencies, with yields, calendar, pair dashboards, and AI access. |
| Entry pricing | Free, no registration.* | Always Free USD tier; Individual $50/month; Business $250/month. |
| Free tier | Entire service is free.* | USD only, 100 requests/day, 15-minute delay on announcements. |
| Coverage | US federal finance in depth: DTS, Debt to the Penny, auctions, average rates, reporting rates for about 170 currencies. | 22 currencies, 700+ series, Treasury par and real yields, federal debt, FX rates, COT, and commodities. |
| Release timing | Yield curve usually posted by 6:00 p.m. ET each trading day; DTS by 4:00 p.m. the following business day; Debt to the Penny one business day later. | Treasury yields as a daily end-of-day series. Scheduled macro releases typically available within seconds of publication, measured publicly. |
| API format | REST JSON, CSV, or XML; every value a string, including "null". Yields as CSV or XML. |
REST JSON with OpenAPI, X-API-Key header, SSE streaming, GraphQL, Python and JS SDKs; numeric values. |
| Rate limits | No published rate limit; page size 1 to 10,000 rows, default 100.* | Paid plans: 1,000,000 requests/month, bursts 300/minute and 5,000/hour, 20 concurrent. |
| History | Debt to the Penny from 1993, DTS from 2005, auctions from 1979, reporting rates from 2001 (older on GovInfo). | 10-year par yield from 1990, real yields from 2003, federal debt from 1993; macro release history with first prints and revisions. |
| AI / MCP | No MCP server listed in the API documentation; agents call the REST API directly. | Official MCP server for Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and other clients. |
| Licence for programmatic use | Offered free and without restriction for non-commercial or commercial use, including redistribution.* | Plans cover own and team use; public redistribution through the self-serve Commercial Redistribution add-on ($10/month per block). |
| Best fit | Liquidity analysis, fiscal research, auction studies, government accounting. | FX traders, cross-country yield spreads, release alerts, multi-currency dashboards, and AI agents. |
* Competitor access terms, limits, and licence retrieved from the Fiscal Data API documentation, dataset pages, and Treasury interest rate pages in October 2026. Treasury lists no paid API tier.
What Treasury Publishes For FX Traders
Treasury's data sits on two sites: Fiscal Data hosts the Bureau of the Fiscal Service datasets behind one REST API, while the daily par yield curve is published on home.treasury.gov. The datasets most relevant to FX work are below.
Treasury datasets an FX desk actually uses*
Daily par yield curve
14 tenors from 1 month to 30 years, plus real (TIPS) curves. On home.treasury.gov, not Fiscal Data.
Daily Treasury Statement
Nine tables of daily cash and debt operations, including the Treasury General Account balance.
Debt to the Penny
Debt held by the public, intragovernmental holdings, and the total, daily from 1993 with a one-business-day lag.
Auctions data
Every bill, note, and bond auction since 1979 with high yield, bid-to-cover, and direct and indirect bidder amounts. Released as needed.
Average interest rates
Monthly average rate on bills, notes, bonds, TIPS, and total marketable debt, from 2001.
Reporting rates of exchange
Quarterly official rates that US agencies use to convert foreign currency balances. Not market rates; see below.
Takeaway: yields show what the market charges the US government, the DTS how much cash it holds, and auctions who turned up to lend.
* Cadence and coverage retrieved from Fiscal Data dataset pages and the Treasury yield curve methodology page in October 2026.
Treasury Yields For FX Work
The par yield curve is the dataset FX traders use most, built from indicative bid-side quotes for the most recently auctioned securities, collected by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York at or near 3:30 p.m. each trading day, and fitted with monotone convex interpolation. The chart plots the 10-year par yield for the last 20 business days from Treasury's 2026 CSV.
US 10-year Treasury par yield, 4 September to 2 October 2026
Percent, daily close of the par yield curve, 20 business days.
Takeaway: the 10-year par yield rose 50 basis points in four weeks, from 4.78% to 5.28%, with the 2-year up 46 basis points over the same days. A move of that size changes the rate gap that carry and relative-value models track in USD/JPY and EUR/USD.
For an FX trader the US curve is half the picture: USD/JPY trades the spread to Japanese yields, EUR/USD the spread to euro-area yields. Treasury publishes only the US side. FXMacroData carries the same Treasury par yields under slugs such as gov_bond_10y, TIPS real yields, and other countries' government yields under the same naming, so the spread is one subtraction. The bond yields dashboard shows the curves side by side.
To be clear on timing: FXMacroData carries the par curve as a daily end-of-day series, not an intraday feed. The second-level timing advantage applies to scheduled releases such as CPI and Non-Farm Payrolls, which move yields during the day. Neither source replaces live bond futures or a dealer feed.
TGA Cash And Dollar Liquidity
The Treasury General Account is the government's operating account at the Federal Reserve. When it rises, cash leaves the banking system; when it falls, cash flows back, which is why liquidity analysts watch it next to the Fed balance sheet. The data comes from the Daily Treasury Statement, and FXMacroData does not carry it, so Fiscal Data is the direct route.
Treasury General Account closing balance, 3 September to 1 October 2026
USD billions, end of day, 20 business days. DTS reports in millions; converted and rounded here.
Takeaway: the balance swung by almost $190 billion in a month, from a low of $818.1 billion on 10 September to $1,004.4 billion on 21 September, with the jump on 15 September matching the mid-month tax date. It closed at $893.7 billion on 1 October.
One detail catches first-time users. Since 18 April 2022 the close_today_bal field in operating_cash_balance is "null"; the closing balance is its own row, "Treasury General Account (TGA) Closing Balance", with the value in open_today_bal. A script that reads the obvious column returns nothing.
Treasury Reporting Rates Of Exchange Are Not Market Rates
The Fiscal Data catalogue includes a dataset that looks like an FX feed: the Treasury Reporting Rates of Exchange. It is useful, but it is not a trading rate. Treasury describes these as the US government's authoritative rates for converting foreign currency balances into dollar equivalents across agency reporting. They are released quarterly, as of the last business day of the month before publication, and amended only if a current rate deviates from the published one by 10% or more.
Treasury reporting rate
- Quarterly, with amendments only on a 10% deviation.
- Foreign units per US dollar: Japan-Yen 162.38 for 30 June 2026.
- About 170 country-currency rows per quarter.
- Built for government accounting consistency.
Market FX rate
- Daily or intraday, changing with every trade.
- Quoted per pair with a timestamp and source.
- What a P&L, backtest, or signal should use.
- In FXMacroData:
/v1/forex/{base}/{quote}.
Takeaway: use the reporting rates for government accounting or to reproduce an agency's dollar figures. Do not use a quarterly reporting rate to mark a position or test a strategy.
The yen series shows why: the reporting rate moved from 144.3 for June 2025 to 162.38 for June 2026 in four quarterly steps, hiding every move in between. FXMacroData's FX endpoints return daily and intraday reference rates with source metadata, the right input for a USD/JPY model.
Timing And Update Cadence
Every Treasury dataset has its own clock, and none is a release-day feed for the macro numbers that usually move the dollar. Here is a typical day for a desk using both.
One trading day, two data paths
1. 8:30 a.m. ET
A scheduled US release such as CPI posts. FXMacroData typically has the row within seconds, with a second-level announcement_datetime.
2. Around 3:30 p.m. ET
The New York Fed collects indicative bid-side quotes for the on-the-run Treasuries that feed the par curve.
3. 4:00 p.m. ET
The DTS for the previous business day is available, including yesterday's TGA closing balance.
4. By 6:00 p.m. ET
Treasury usually posts the day's par yield curve. FXMacroData then carries it as the day's end-of-day yield row.
FXMacroData targets one second from actual publication for scheduled releases and publishes the measured record at /release-speed, by source, listing every release that took longer. Upcoming CPI, payrolls, and Federal Reserve decisions sit on the release calendar; Treasury auctions do not, so auction strategies still need Treasury's announcements.
API Format And Developer Experience
The Fiscal Data API is consistent across datasets: every endpoint accepts fields, filter (for example record_date:gte:2026-09-01), sort, format, and page[size], and returns data, meta, and links. Every field arrives as a string, nulls included, and endpoints are versioned per dataset, such as v2/accounting/od/debt_to_penny. The yield curve is separate: a yearly CSV or an XML feed with tenor columns such as 10 Yr.
FXMacroData uses one route pattern for every currency and indicator. A US 10-year yield request looks like this:
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY" "https://api.fxmacrodata.com/v1/announcements/usd/gov_bond_10y"Example response (abridged, illustrative):
{
"currency": "USD",
"indicator": "gov_bond_10y",
"source": "US Treasury",
"source_series_name": "Daily Treasury Par Yield Curve Rates, 10 Yr",
"data": [
{
"date": "2026-10-02",
"val": 5.28,
"previous_value": 5.24,
"change_from_previous": 0.04,
"source": "US Treasury"
}
]
}Fields an FX model uses
valandchange_from_previousarrive as numbers.- The same slug pattern works for other countries' yields.
- Source series name ties the row back to Treasury's table.
The Treasury equivalent
A CSV row dated 10/02/2026 with 5.28 in the 10 Yr column. Official and exact, but US only, with the date format and day-on-day change left for you to handle.
Takeaway: the same official number in a different wrapper. Treasury gives you the source table; FXMacroData gives you a row that already lines up with yields and releases from 21 other currencies.
The same pattern returns the Fed policy rate, the US unemployment rate, or the euro-area policy rate decided by the ECB, so a yield-spread model and a macro-surprise model share one client.
Licence And Commercial Use
Treasury's licence is simple: the Fiscal Data documentation says the data may be copied, adapted, redistributed, or otherwise used for non-commercial or commercial purposes, free and without restriction.
FXMacroData plans cover an individual's or team's own research, dashboards, notebooks, alerts, and API scripts. Showing FXMacroData data to an outside audience is covered by the self-serve Commercial Redistribution add-on at $10/month per block of up to 100 measured users or 1,000 public-feed followers.
How FXMacroData Builds On Treasury Data
FXMacroData's US Treasury yields come from Treasury's own daily par and real yield curves, with history for the 10-year back to 1990, and its US federal debt series comes from the Debt to the Penny dataset, sampled at quarter end. Each series names its Treasury source table, so the official page remains the authority if a value is ever questioned. FXMacroData does not carry the Daily Treasury Statement, TGA balances, auction results, average interest rates, or the reporting rates of exchange; those stay on Fiscal Data.
Around the yields, FXMacroData adds one schema for 22 currencies, release-timed macro data, FX rates, COT positioning, commodities, central-bank press releases, and an MCP server, so a Treasury sell-off can be read against USD/JPY in one place.
Where Treasury's Own APIs Are Genuinely Stronger
- It is the source of record. The par curve, the DTS, and Debt to the Penny start at Treasury, with published methodology for each.
- Datasets nobody else repackages well. TGA cash, deposits and withdrawals, auction bidder detail, and average interest rates on the debt are all one free call away.
- Cost and licence. Free, keyless, and explicitly open for commercial reuse and redistribution.
- History. Auctions back to 1979 and daily debt back to 1993 suit long fiscal studies.
- Bulk pulls. Up to 10,000 rows per page and CSV output make large downloads efficient.
Where FXMacroData Is Stronger For FX Teams
FXMacroData strengths
- Treasury yields and other countries' yields under one schema.
- Macro releases typically available within seconds, with a public speed record.
- Calendar, FX rates, COT, pair dashboards, and MCP.
FXMacroData tradeoffs
- Paid beyond the delayed USD free tier.
- No TGA, DTS, or auction results.
- Yields are end-of-day, not intraday.
Treasury strengths
- Free, keyless, open licence.
- Deep federal cash, debt, and auction data.
- Long histories and bulk CSV.
Treasury tradeoffs
- US only; spreads need other countries' sources.
- Yields and Fiscal Data on separate sites and formats.
- All values as strings; no release calendar or MCP.
Takeaway: Treasury wins on federal finance depth and cost. FXMacroData wins when yields are one input in a cross-currency model that also reacts to data releases.
A trader modelling GBP/USD or AUD/USD on rate differentials would otherwise pair Treasury's CSV with UK and Australian yield files, each with its own labels, dates, and holidays. FXMacroData returns them in one shape, and its rate differential endpoint does the subtraction.
Decision Matrix
| User type | Better fit | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Dollar liquidity analyst tracking the TGA | Treasury Fiscal Data | The DTS is the only source, free and daily. |
| Auction demand researcher | Treasury Fiscal Data | Bid-to-cover and bidder categories for every auction since 1979. |
| FX trader using yield spreads | FXMacroData | US and foreign curves in one schema, plus pair dashboards. |
| Quant running release event studies | FXMacroData | Second-level release timestamps and first prints next to daily yields. |
| Hobby notebook checking the 10-year | Either | Treasury CSV and FXMacroData Always Free both cost nothing. |
| Macro desk or AI agent covering the dollar | Both | Treasury for cash and auctions; FXMacroData for yields, releases, and MCP. |
Recommendation
Use the Treasury Fiscal Data API for federal finance detail: TGA balances, daily debt, auctions, average interest rates, or reporting rates for accounting. It is free, keyless, open for commercial reuse, and the reference FXMacroData builds on. If you only need the US curve, Treasury's CSV or XML is enough.
Use FXMacroData when Treasury yields feed an FX decision: comparing the US curve with Japan's or the euro area's, reacting to CPI and payrolls as they print, or giving an AI assistant source-linked macro context across currencies. Compare the plans, read the API reference, and check the measured release-speed record before deciding. AI-focused teams can start from the AI trading guides.
Bottom line: Treasury's Fiscal Data API is the right free source for US federal cash, debt, and auction data, and its reporting rates of exchange are for government accounting, not trading. FXMacroData is the right layer for FX teams that need Treasury yields lined up with 21 other currencies' curves and with release-timed macro data. Desks that trade dollar liquidity benefit from both.
Sources Checked
The Treasury claims in this article come from the official Treasury pages and API responses below, checked in October 2026.
Fiscal Data API
No-registration access, parameters, string data types, response codes, licence.
API documentationCash and debt datasets
DTS tables and TGA field note; Debt to the Penny cadence and history.
Daily Treasury Statement · Debt to the PennyRates and auctions datasets
Reporting rates of exchange, average interest rates, auctions data.
Rates of exchange · Average rates · AuctionsYield curve
Daily par yield curve rates; inputs, 3:30 p.m. quotes, 6:00 p.m. posting.
Par yield curve · MethodologyTakeaway: every Treasury figure here can be reproduced with a keyless Fiscal Data call or a home.treasury.gov download.
Related Reading
- FXMacroData vs FRED for the free US macro archive that also mirrors Treasury yields.
- FXMacroData vs BLS API for the official source behind US CPI and payrolls.
- FXMacroData vs ECB Data Portal API for the euro-area side of the yield spread.
- Best macroeconomic data APIs in 2026 for a broader buyer guide.
