Citizen Debt Forecast
The Citizen Debt Forecast (CDF) is a ten-year federal debt-to-GDP projection, composed of bottom-up, crowdsourced data from people on Kalshi. It offers an alternative data point to the traditional projection from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).Public debt as a share of GDPAnnual · 2026–2036
Loading the market curves.
Debt / GDP in 2036
Citizen Debt Forecast—
CBO baseline120%
Your model—
Assumptions
Real GDP growth
%
Inflation
%
Fed fundsCurve build: 4.3%
%
Primary deficitCBO: 2.2%
%
Scenarios
Forward Curves
Forward curves track implied future prices. The CDF is composed of these three forward curves, which are derived from the public's opinion on Kalshi.Real GDP Growth needed to hit a Debt-to-GDP target
Pick a target debt/GDP for 2036. The dashed line is the real GDP growth it would take to get there; the solid line is where people on Kalshi have growth heading today.Hold debt / GDP to%by 2036
Required average real growth—
Required average nominal growth—
Loading the market curves.
The solid line is the real GDP growth people on Kalshi imply; the dashed line is what it would take to land debt/GDP exactly on the target by 2036. When the dashed line sits below the solid, the market is already on track to beat the target. The required nominal figure above adds market inflation on top of the real rate.Fiscal risk through 2045 · CBO forecast only
Where net interest and the total deficit head over the long run, as a share of GDP, out to 2045. This runs past the horizon of Kalshi's markets, so it is a CBO forecast only, shown for context against a 6% fiscal-stress reference.Net interest & deficit vs GDPCBO long-term · 2026–2045
Net interest / GDPTotal deficit / GDP
2030 · Passes WWII record2032 · Social Security OASI exhaustion
Sustained readings above 6% of GDP flag fiscal stress: the total deficit crosses it in the early 2030s and net interest approaches it by 2045. This is a static long-run projection anchored to CBO's baseline. Kalshi's markets don't trade this far out, so, unlike the charts above, it doesn't move with the live market. Risk-regime labels are analytical framing, not official thresholds.Methodology notes
Read more- 1CBO baseline. The CBO path is the Congressional Budget Office's official long-term fiscal baseline and serves as the model's reference case for debt and primary deficits.
- 2Market-implied overlay. The model keeps the CBO fiscal path broadly fixed, but allows key macro assumptions to reprice with markets. Kalshi market expectations inform real GDP growth and inflation, while near-term Fed expectations are anchored to Kalshi markets and the rate curve transitions to Fed Funds OIS further out. Only the portion of Treasury debt that matures or reprices each year is exposed to prevailing refinancing rates.
- 3Debt roll-forward. Each fiscal year, the model adds the primary deficit and interest expense to the prior year's debt, then divides ending debt by nominal GDP. Market prices and some modelling assumptions become less certain further out, so the output is best interpreted as a live conditional scenario, not a precise point forecast.