US holdings of foreign securities rose to $19.3 trillion at end-2025
Serguey Asael Shinder1 min readThe US Treasury released final data on 30 October from its annual survey of US portfolio holdings of foreign securities, measured at the end of 2025. The survey, run jointly with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Federal Reserve Board, put the total at about $19.3 trillion, up from $15.8 trillion at the end of 2024.
The increase was mainly in equity. Holdings of foreign equity rose from $12.1 trillion to $15.2 trillion, while long-term debt securities rose from $3.3 trillion to $3.6 trillion and short-term debt was roughly unchanged at $0.4 trillion. By country, the largest holdings were in the Cayman Islands at $3.1 trillion, followed by the United Kingdom at $2.0 trillion, Canada at $1.9 trillion and Japan at $1.5 trillion. Ireland followed at $1.2 trillion and France at $0.9 trillion. Taiwan, at $668 billion, was held entirely in equity.
The complementary survey, which measures foreign holdings of US securities, is being processed for end-June 2026, with preliminary results expected on 26 February 2027.
What it means
A $3.4 trillion rise in a single year, almost all of it in equity, is mostly a story of prices rather than flows: the survey measures market value, so a strong year for foreign stock markets lifts the total whether or not Americans bought more. For the dollar, the number matters as the asset side of the US external balance sheet, the counterpart to the foreign-holdings survey due in February.