The BoJ held about ¥502 trillion of government bonds at the end of September

Serguey Asael Shinder02 October 2026, 17:481 min read

The Bank of Japan has published its holdings of Japanese government bonds as of 30 September, issue by issue, in a table released on 2 October. The table lists face values, rounded to the nearest ¥100 million, for 334 separate issues; it gives no totals, so the figures below are our sum of the Bank's own numbers.

Added together, the holdings come to about ¥502.0 trillion at face value. Ten-year bonds are the largest block, at about ¥220.0 trillion across 43 issues, or 43.8% of the total. Twenty-year bonds follow at about ¥125.0 trillion across 105 issues, 24.9%, and five-year bonds at about ¥75.5 trillion, 15.0%. Thirty-year bonds account for about ¥53.0 trillion, 10.6%, two-year bonds for about ¥12.2 trillion, 2.4%, and 40-year bonds for about ¥11.6 trillion, 2.3%. Inflation-indexed bonds are under 1%, at about ¥4.7 trillion.

The Bank's notes say the figures cover bonds bought through outright purchases and those acquired through its transactions with the government. The table does not show the change from the previous month, and the release does not comment on it.

For context, the Bank's separate monetary base release for September, published the same day, showed current account balances held by financial institutions at the Bank 18.3% lower than a year earlier, consistent with the gradual reduction of bond purchases under which maturing bonds are not fully replaced.

Why it matters

The size and maturity mix of the BoJ's bond portfolio decide how much interest-rate risk it carries and how quickly holdings run off. With most of the stock in 10- and 20-year bonds, the run-down through maturities is slow, which is why the Bank's balance sheet will stay large for years even as purchases fall.