The Treasury counts 102.7 million matured savings bonds nobody has cashed — a record — and Series EE, not the war-era bonds, is driving the rise

Every month the Treasury's Bureau of the Fiscal Service publishes a count of savings bonds that have matured — reached the age at which they stop earning interest — and still have not been cashed. The dataset is called Matured Unredeemed Debt. In Treasury's own words, "bond owners hold onto bonds after they have reached maturity and are no longer earning interest," and "these outstanding but unredeemed bonds are called Matured Unredeemed Debt (MUD)," which "the government continues to be responsible for". We pulled the complete file this run — all 319 monthly snapshots from January 2000 through July 2026, and every one of the 13 bond series it tracks (retrieved 2026-08-24). As of July 31, 2026, the file counts 102,720,578 matured, unredeemed bonds. That is the highest total in the 26-year record, and more than five times (5.22×) the 19,692,442 counted in January 2000, the earliest reading available. The count has risen at nearly every monthly reading in between. Two series account for 99.4% of the pile: Series EE, at 82,236,813 bonds (80.1%), and Series E, at 19,832,306 (19.3%). The other eleven series — A through D, F, G, H, HH, J, K, and Savings Notes, several dating to the 1930s and 1940s — together add 651,459. The record still logs 752 uncashed matured Series A bonds and 96 Series K. Treasury has separately, and without stating an as-of date, put the dollar value of the pile at roughly $29.7 billion across "more than 80 million" bonds ^mmodeled — a rounded public figure that sits below the 102.72 million pieces the dated MUD count records for July 31.

The following is analysis, not fact. Read across the whole 26-year file, the record's growth has changed hands. Series E — the bond Americans bought to finance World War II, sold from 1941 until the series was discontinued in 1980 — reached final maturity for the last of its holders in 2010, when the final 30-year bonds stopped earning interest. Its matured-unredeemed count peaked at 43,082,443 in November 2009 and has since more than halved, to 19.8 million: with no E bonds issued since 1980, that matured stock can only draw down as the bonds are redeemed, and it does. Series EE runs the other way. First issued in 1980, EE bonds reach final maturity and stop earning interest 30 years after issue. They began appearing in the MUD file around 2010 — three decades after the series launched — and have climbed from 2.3 million that year to 82.2 million now. In 2016, EE passed E to become the largest single block of dead, uncashed bonds. The wave began with the 1980 issues crossing 30 years in 2010; the 1980s cohorts crossed through the 2010s, and it now reaches the 1996 issues turning 30 this year. The whole-record read isolates the driver. Between July 2025 and July 2026 the total rose 3,297,065. Series EE alone rose 3,767,409; every other series combined fell 470,344. The pool is at a record not because more people are forgetting old bonds — the older series' counts are falling on net — but because EE bonds are reaching final maturity faster than they are being cashed. The count is a net stock: it cannot separate how many EE bonds freshly matured from how many were redeemed, only the net direction, which is consistent with a maturity calendar fixed decades ago. It does not, by itself, measure why any bond stays uncashed ^sspeculative.

A record count is not a fiscal alarm, and reading it as one inverts the accounting. A matured bond has stopped earning interest: the government still owes the principal and the interest already accrued, but the meter has stopped, so an uncashed matured bond accrues nothing further each year — unlike a live bond, whose cost keeps climbing. The rising count is also mechanical — EE bonds are reaching final maturity faster than they are being cashed — and on its own says nothing about owner behavior. Nor is the money necessarily lost to the owner. A matured bond can still be redeemed at any time. Treasury retired its Treasury Hunt search on September 30, 2025; unclaimed matured securities are now routed through the states' unclaimed-property programs (via the National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators), and a lost or destroyed bond is claimed on Treasury's own forms. The dollar scale is also small against the whole: Treasury's ~$29.7 billion estimate is under 0.08% of the $39.46 trillion in total public debt outstanding as of June 30. What the count shows cleanly is narrower than any headline about lost billions — the timing of the rise tracks a decades-old issuance calendar, and that calendar currently points up.