Trade · Updated monthly · Figures to June 2026
Why does America buy more than it sells?
America bought $73.3 billion more from the world than it sold in June 2026. Here's the whole record, and what that gap is - before anyone tells you what to feel about it.
You're being asked to have an opinion about the trade deficit again - every election, every tariff round, always as either a scandal or nothing at all. Before anyone hands you theirs, here's the thing itself: the gap between what America sells to the world and what it buys, every month since 1992. Below zero, the country bought more than it sold. You'll notice the line lives down there.
So, what are we looking at, exactly?
Exports minus imports, goods and services together, each month, adjusted for the seasons. Services (software, finance, tourism, royalties) run a surplus; goods run a much bigger deficit; this line is the net of both. The deep spike downward is the pandemic-era buying binge - the widest monthly gap on record, $133 billion in March 2025.
The last month America sold more than it bought
Before 1992
How long has this been going on?
Long enough that almost nobody reading this has adult memories of the alternative. The persistence is the interesting part: a gap this durable isn't a blip or one bad deal, it's structural - America consumes and invests more than it produces, and the rest of the world funds the difference by buying American assets, from Treasury bonds to office towers.
Over the last twelve months the gap has averaged $61.9 billion a month. Individual months make headlines; the average is the economy's actual posture.
Calculated from the chart aboveDoes a trade deficit mean America is losing?
Not by itself - and not winning either. A deficit is an accounting fact, not a scoreboard: every dollar of it comes back as foreign investment in American assets, by definition. Whether that trade-off is good depends on what the money funds and what happened to the industries on the losing end - which is a real argument with real casualties, and it isn't settled by the size of one number. What the chart can give you is scale and persistence; the Bureau of Economic Analysis release behind it breaks the gap down by country and category if you want to see where it sits.
What this chart can't tell you
It nets two enormous flows into one line, so it hides which goods and which partners moved. Monthly figures get revised as late paperwork arrives. And it says nothing about tariffs' effects on its own - a smaller deficit can mean healthier exports or just a poorer country buying less, and the line can't tell you which.
Further reading
All of our numbers come from live, free government data - the US trade balance in goods and services via FRED, published monthly by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Every figure on this page is calculated from that series, and the page updates when the new month lands.
If you want to dig deeper, the BEA's trade release carries the country-by-country detail free.