How to read a Treasury bill auction result

Drafted with AI assistance from official sources; checked against the sources listed below.

A Treasury bill result is a short table that Treasury publishes about two minutes after bids close. This guide reads one real result line by line: the 26-week bill auctioned on 28 September 2026.

The rate: high, median and low

Competitive bidders bid a discount rate. Treasury accepts the lowest rates first, until the amount on offer is sold. The last rate it needs to accept is the high rate, and every accepted bid gets that rate: the auction is a single-price auction.

The median and low rates say how spread out the accepted bids were. Half of the accepted competitive bids, by amount, were at 4.250% or less; the lowest accepted bid was 4.150%. Those bidders still get 4.285%.

Discount rate, investment rate and price

The three lines say the same thing three ways. The bill pays $100 at maturity, 182 days after it is issued on 1 October 2026:

• The price, $97.833694, is what a buyer pays for $100 of face value.
• The discount rate, 4.285%, is the $2.166 discount as a share of $100, scaled to a 360-day year: 100 minus 100 × 0.04285 × 182 ÷ 360 gives the price.
• The investment rate, 4.441%, is what the price earns, scaled to a 365-day year. It can be compared with the yield on a note or bond, and it is always higher than the discount rate.

(The arithmetic is ours, from the published figures.) The guide to bills, notes, bonds, TIPS and FRNs explains why bills have two rates at all.

How much was bid, and who bought

• Total accepted is larger than the offering because it includes bills the Federal Reserve takes for its own portfolio (SOMA), about $7.84 billion here, on top of the amount offered to the public.
• The bid-to-cover ratio is the amount bid divided by the amount accepted. Bids came to 2.64 times what was sold.
• Allotted at high is the share of bids at exactly the high rate that were filled. At 37.89%, bidders at 4.285% got a little over a third of what they asked for; bids at lower rates were filled in full.
• Noncompetitive bids, up to $10 million each, are filled in full at the high rate without naming a rate.

Of the competitive bids accepted, indirect bidders took about 60.3%, primary dealers about 30.2% and direct bidders about 9.5% (our arithmetic from the published amounts).

Comparing bill results

A bill result says the most next to other results of the same term. Two things to keep in mind:

• Compare rates of the same kind. The discount rate of a 4-week bill and the investment rate of a 52-week bill measure different things. 500metrics names the rate in every sentence.
• Bid-to-cover ratios differ by term. The 52-week bill of 29 September 2026 drew 3.07; the 26-week bill the day before, 2.64. Each bill page compares a result only with earlier auctions of the same term; the Treasury bill auctions page lists every bill term.

What this guide cannot tell you

• What the next bill auction will pay. Each rate is set by its own auction; 500metrics publishes results and never forecasts them.
• Whether a bill suits anyone. 500metrics describes securities and their results; it does not compare them as investments.