How much is $40 trillion?

Numbers this big stop meaning anything. So here's the national debt in things you can picture.

In $100 bills

A $100 bill is 6.14 inches long, 2.61 inches wide, 0.0043 inches thick and weighs about a gram. The national debt is about 404 billion of them. Stacked flat:

• The stack would be about 27,000 miles tall — taller than the distance around the Earth at the equator, and more than 100 times higher than the International Space Station.
• It would weigh about 400,000 metric tons — more than the Empire State Building.
• Packed tight, it would fill about 180 Olympic swimming pools. Spread across a football field, the pile would be roughly 280 feet deep.

The animation on our home page stacks it up past the landmarks in real time.

In $1 bills

In single dollars, the stack would be about 2.7 million miles high — far enough to reach the Moon and back more than five times over.

In time

• Counting it: at one $100 bill per second, nonstop, it would take about 12,800 years to count the debt.
• Spending it: if you'd spent $1 million every day since the year 1 AD, you'd have spent about $740 billion by now — less than 2% of the debt. Spending all of it at that rate would take more than 110,000 years.
• In seconds: a trillion seconds is about 31,700 years. Forty trillion seconds ago, there were no modern humans yet.

Per person

No one sends you a bill for your share, of course. The debt is paid down (or not) through future taxes, spending decisions and economic growth. But it's a useful way to compare a number this size to a household budget.

How fast it's growing

Over the past year, the debt has grown by about $77,000 per second — $6.7 billion a day, or $2.4 trillion a year. That's about 770 hundred-dollar bills every second, which is exactly how many pour out of the spigot on our home page.