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Published on September 26, 2025 | Prices Last Reviewed for Freshness: September 2025
Written by Alec Pow - Economic & Pricing Investigator | Content Reviewed by CFA Alexander Popinker
CFA Educational content; not financial advice. Prices are estimates; confirm current rates, fees, taxes, and terms with providers or official sources.
Reported cost: $3 Million – $1 Billion · — No prices given by community members
- Consensus anchor: $300M–$1.0B/day based on CBO analysis of the 2018–2019 lapse and an S&P Global rule-of-thumb, scope adjusted.
- Our working range (typical broad-lapse day): ~$350M–$1.05B/day after adding conservative reliability penalties, behavioral deferrals, and small spread bumps.
- Peak-day tail risk (stacked stressors): ~$1.2B–$1.3B/day when peak travel/tax-season congestion, contractor idling, and a 3–5 bp spread bump hit at once.
Per household per day (132.2M households, 2024 FRED): $2.27–$7.56 (consensus), ~$7.94 (our working top), ~$9.08–$9.83 (tail-risk days).
How the per-household math works- Lower bound: 300,000,000 ÷ 132,216,000 ≈ $2.27 per household.
- Upper (consensus) bound: 1,000,000,000 ÷ 132,216,000 ≈ $7.56.
- Our working top: 1,050,000,000 ÷ 132,216,000 ≈ $7.94.
- Tail-risk band: 1,200,000,000–1,300,000,000 ÷ 132,216,000 ≈ $9.08–$9.83.
TL;DR
Jump to sections- $300M–$1.0B/day (consensus) from CBO’s realized losses and S&P’s yardstick.
- Our working range: ~$350M–$1.05B/day after layering reliability penalties, behavior, and spreads.
- Peak-day tail risk: ~$1.2B–$1.3B/day when multiple stressors stack (peak travel/tax season + contractor idling + 3–5 bp spreads).
- Daily swing factors: aviation delays, park/museum closures, contractor idle time, refund timing.
- Some items get paid later, but many losses are not recoverable (tourism, contractor hours, missed business).
- Even without a formal lapse, a spread bump of 1–5 bp (0.01–0.05%) adds roughly $10M–$51M/day in interest while sustained.
On peak-stress days, stacked effects can push shutdown costs well above $1B, into the $1.2–$1.3B range.
Related day-rate calibration: Our breakdown of National Guard deployment costs per day shows how personnel, logistics, and ops line items stack on a true daily meter.
Why most statistics get the numbers wrong
Most “shutdown cost” stats use a narrow lens or smooth out the worst days. Here’s why that misses real money:
- Budget isn’t value. Back pay restores salaries, not the services or same-day spending that didn’t happen.
- Averages hide peaks. A 35-day average can bury the few worst days when airports snarl or refunds stack up.
- Spillovers get missed. Reliability penalties, missed trips that aren’t rescheduled, and deferred purchases don’t show up on federal ledgers.
- Rates move fast. Rates can move within hours, and on a $37T base even a tiny change is real money.
The headline range is conservative; bad days are worse than the averages suggest.
We treat the headline range as conservative for five reasons that standard summaries often underweight:
- Reliability penalties are real money. Airlines and contractors pay liquidated damages (contractual late fees) and schedule penalties that do not show up in simple value-of-time math. Even a 1 percent reliability surcharge on $1.0B of affected daily activity adds ~$10M/day. See USDOT BCA 2024 for time-value baselines; the surcharge is a reasonable add-on for reliability risk.
- Refund behavior, not just float. Households who expect refunds often delay durable purchases. If $3B in refunds shift a day and 5–10 percent of recipients defer a $300 purchase, short-run consumption drag can be $45–$90M/day even though interest float is only ~$0.33–$0.41M (see IRS 3/1/2024, 3/22/2024).
- Seasonality can swing costs by tens of millions per day. A lapse during peak travel or tax season magnifies items D and E in the waterfall. TSA passenger counts exceed 3.0M/day on peaks, which doubles delay costs relative to a 1.5M trough day (BTS/TSA).
- Contractor payments are often non-recoverable. Back pay covers federal employees, but contractors typically cannot bill for idle hours, so item B skews permanent. GAO case write-ups show stop-work orders that strand labor and material (GAO-20-201).
- Spread channel scales with debt stock. With public debt above $37T, even a +1 bp (0.01 percentage point) stress premium is about $10.2M/day, and +5 bp around $51.2M/day until confidence normalizes (Treasury Debt to the Penny).
Tiny spread moves on a $37T base compound into newsroom-worthy daily dollars.
What our adjusted daily range looks like
| ~$314M/day (CBO) CBO 2019 analysis |
Average day across a partial, 35-day lapse. | Reliability penalties ≈ $5–$15M + behavioral deferrals ≈ $20–$60M (off-peak) + small spread bumps ≈ $10–$20M Working range: ~$350–$500M/day |
| ~$0.9B/day (S&P full-scope) S&P yardstick (via Axios) |
Full-breadth shutdown rule-of-thumb. | Reliability penalties ≈ $10–$20M + peak-season behavior ≈ $45–$90M + spreads ≈ $10–$51M Working range: ~$950M–$1.05B/day on peak stress days |
Consensus vs. our working & tail-risk ranges.Consensus from CBO (2019) and S&P (2018). Our bands add reliability penalties, behavioral deferrals, and small spread bumps.
Notes: Add-ons are conservative and illustrative; they reflect penalties and behavior shifts that typical budget or GDP lenses underweight.
Why this talk now
Congress avoided a shutdown, but the negotiations and contingency drills carried real costs, and the same arguments over continuing resolutions and policy riders will surface again near the next funding cliff. Agencies prepared stop-work plans and deferred actions, contractors paused decisions, and some grants or procurements slipped even without an official halt.
The daily price tag matters because a shutdown does not simply shift federal paychecks forward. It dents travel spending around parks and museums, jams airport throughput, delays loans and refunds, raises restart friction, and, when brinkmanship drags, can widen credit spreads that feed into borrowing costs for everyone. Journalists and everyday readers want a clean, sourced number they can quote without oversimplifying the moving parts.
What counts as cost
There are three practical lenses. The budget lens captures direct outlays such as back pay for furloughed employees and overtime to clear backlogs. The GDP lens captures lost or delayed private activity such as tourism, small business credit, and airline operations. The people lens separates who receives back pay later and who does not. In 2013, the Office of Management and Budget reported about $2.5 billion in pay and benefits to furloughed workers for hours not worked, a budget cost that did not restore the services those hours would have produced.
For the anatomy of large civic-process bills (petition gathering, legal, compliance, media), compare our breakdown of the cost to mount a statewide redistricting ballot measure.
Not all losses are equal. Delayed tax refunds and some federal purchases tend to be recouped, at least on paper, while a missed trip to a national park, a canceled museum day, a dropped business meeting, or a contractor’s idle shift rarely comes back in full. During the 2013 lapse, national groups cited a U.S. Travel estimate near $152 million per day in travel-related losses, a sector anchor for non-recoverable activity (ABC News citing U.S. Travel).
“Back pay restores paychecks, not the services that would have happened.”
How Much Does a Government Shutdown Cost Per Day?
The Congressional Budget Office estimated the 35-day partial lapse that ended in January 2019 shaved $11 billion off output across two quarters, with $3 billion permanently lost. That back-of-the-envelope works out to roughly $314 million per day over the period, excluding hard-to-quantify spillovers such as reputation damage or attrition (CBO).
Earlier episodes point the same way. The 2013 shutdown imposed measurable payroll and operations costs on the federal side, and independent tallies of private sector hits ranged into the billions when tourism leakage and airport delays were added. S&P Global’s rule of thumb ahead of 2018 put a full shutdown near $6.5 billion per week (about $0.9 billion per day) if scope widened. Duration and breadth make harm non-linear.
“The longer it lasts, the worse each day gets.”
The daily cost waterfall
These expandable cards show formulas, example inputs and sourced anchors so readers can see the math and deduce plausible daily totals.
A) Federal workforce disruption
Formula: idle employees × average daily compensation − recoverable output.
| Illustrative idle headcount | 400,000 workers |
| Avg daily compensation | $300 (example) |
| Payroll exposure | $120 million/day |
| Data-derived anchor | ~$379/day average in 2013 ($2.5B ÷ 6.6M furlough-days) |
OMB logged 6.6 million furlough days and $2.5B in pay and benefits for hours not worked in 2013.
SourcesB) Federal contractors’ idle time
Formula: idle contractor days × average bill rate × idle fraction.
| Idle contractor days | 150,000 |
| Avg bill rate | $400 |
| Daily loss | $60 million |
Contractors typically do not receive back pay, so these losses are largely unrecoverable.
SourcesGAO-20-201 Selected Agencies, 2020
C) Procurement and grants pauses
Formula: obligations normally awarded per day × slip penalty + restart rework.
| Daily obligations | $3.0B |
| Slip penalty | 0.2% |
| Friction cost | ~$6 million/day |
Agencies reported delayed solicitations, award slippage and re-competitions after the 2018–2019 lapse.
SourcesD) Air travel throughput
Formula: passengers × added minutes × value-of-time + airline penalties.
| 2.5M passengers × 5 min × $0.42/min | ~$5.2M |
| 2.5M passengers × 10 min × $0.42/min | ~$10.4M |
USDOT values personal travel time near $25/hour; TSA throughput often exceeds 2.5M/day. A Jan 2019 LaGuardia ground stop showed how staffing strain can cascade.
SourcesUSDOT BCA 2024 · BTS TSA trend · Reuters LaGuardia 2019
E) IRS operations and refund float
Formula: refunds moving per day × short-term rate.
| $3.0B | 4–5% | $0.33–$0.41M |
IRS reported cumulative refunds of $127B by Mar 1, 2024 and ~$169–172B by Mar 22, implying billions flowing daily at peak.
SourcesF) SBA, USDA and DOE credit pipelines
Formula: daily approvals × opportunity-cost per day + payroll knock-ons.
| SBA 7(a) FY2024 volume | ~$56B |
| Avg approvals/day | ~$150M (56B ÷ 365) |
| One-day interest at 6% | ~$24.7K (0.06 × 150M ÷ 365) |
Pure interest costs look small, but payroll and vendor payments tied to approvals create local stress when paused.
SourceG) National parks and museums
Formula: visitors lost × avg local spend × non-substitution rate.
| Park-adjacent visitor spend lost | ~$31M/day over a 16-day episode |
| Smithsonian closures revenue | Losses reported during 2019 closures |
States sometimes fund park operations temporarily because local spillovers exceed the subsidy.
SourcesAAM museum impacts · Cronkite News (AZ Grand Canyon funding)
H) Research and labs
Formula: grant burn rate × labs paused + restart waste.
- 111 NSF grant-review panels were canceled during the 2018–2019 lapse.
- Rescheduling cascaded for months, pushing deliverables and hiring.
I) Food and drug inspections
Formula: inspections missed × baseline incident probability × incident cost.
Routine oversight scaled back in prior lapses, raising expected risk costs even if incidents remain rare. Label this as expected value, not a prediction.
SourceJ) Customs and ports
Formula: cargo value delayed × daily carrying cost of capital.
| Goods imports, July 2025 | $358.8B, ~$11.6B/day |
| Delay example | $2.0B × 5% ÷ 365 ≈ $0.27M/day in financing |
BEA/Census FT900 July 2025 · FT900 PDF
K) Defense programs and stop work
Formula: program daily burn × delay factor + liquidated damages where applicable.
Milestone slippage and idled lines during lapses later inflate catch-up costs and schedule risk.
SourceL) Ratings and Treasury spreads
Formula: total federal debt × spread change.
| +1 bp on $37.4T | ~$10.2M/day |
| +5 bp on $37.4T | ~$51.2M/day |
Debt to the Penny shows outstanding debt in the mid $30Ts, so small spread moves scale quickly.
SourcesU.S. Treasury Debt to the Penny · S&P context via Axios
M) Household consumption drag
Formula: affected income per day × marginal propensity to consume × multiplier.
Part of the measured GDP hit reflects lower near-term spending by furloughed workers and households awaiting refunds, even with later back pay.
SourceN) Local cluster effects
Formula: metro federal payroll share × metro GDP/day + tourism share × non-substitution.
Federal hubs such as Washington DC, Hampton Roads and Huntsville feel outsized daily hits when offices go quiet and visitors cancel.
BackgroundO) Restart friction
Formula: backlog clearance hours × avg comp + compliance rework + overtime.
Overtime and re-work inflate post-lapse costs, particularly where compliance timelines reset.
SourceStatic scenario table
Use this grid to describe range, drivers and irrecoverable shares in plain language.
This table translates component math into three recognizable news scenarios. The irrecoverable share rises with duration because tourism, contractor hours and attrition effects compound.
| Short jolt | 3 to 5 days | Limited agencies | $250 million to $450 million | TSA or FAA staffing, parks, contractors | Low to medium |
| Grinding pause | 2 to 3 weeks | Broad | $350 million to $700 million | Refund float, loan approvals, research stalls | Medium |
| Structural harm | 30 plus days | Broad | $600 million to $1.0 billion | Ratings spread, attrition, defense slips | High |
These brackets square with a realized $314 million per day average for 2019 and an ≈$0.9 billion per day full-scope yardstick if breadth and duration expand.
New quick-read tables
Grab defensible numbers fast, with sources linked in captions.
| 2.5 million | 5 | ≈ $0.42 | ~$5.2 million |
| 2.5 million | 10 | ≈ $0.42 | ~$10.4 million |
| 2.8 million | 10 | ≈ $0.42 | ~$11.8 million |
Per-household equivalents translate big GDP figures into everyday scale without implying a tax bill.
| $300 million | $2.27 |
| $450 million | $3.40 |
| $700 million | $5.29 |
| $1.0 billion | $7.56 |
Per-household equivalents.Converts national daily totals into household-scale dollars using 132.2M U.S. households (FRED TTLHHM156N, 2024).
Spread math shows how brinkmanship, even without a lapse, can raise borrowing costs at scale.
| $37.4 trillion | +1 bp | ~$3.74 billion | ~$10.2 million |
| $37.4 trillion | +5 bp | ~$18.7 billion | ~$51.2 million |
Brinkmanship spread math, visualized.On ~$37.4T in federal debt, small spread moves add up quickly (Treasury Debt to the Penny).
Worked example for a single day
Consider a limited-scope day affecting a slice of the federal workforce and several high-visibility services.
| Federal payroll exposure (idle) | $120 million |
| Contractor idle time | $60 million |
| Parks and museum tourism leakage | $25 million |
| Airport delay value of time | $20 million |
| Restart friction and rework | $15 million |
| Subtotal | $240 million |
Add refund float impacts and small-business credit timing, and the daily total plausibly approaches $300 million. This arithmetic is illustrative, not a forecast, but it mirrors ranges in CBO and S&P benchmarks.
Back pay does not include restart overtime or weekend work, which can run tens of millions across large agencies after a long pause. Procurement re-competitions and compliance checks add smaller but real administrative bills. States also pay to keep marquee parks open to shield local economies, as Arizona and Utah pledged in 2023, after earlier outlays during 2013.
For a concrete analogue of non-payroll rework (signage, seals, forms, IT, contracts), see our estimate of rebranding the Pentagon to the “Department of War”.
Real cases
In Jan 2019, a LaGuardia ground stop tied to staffing strain rippled across the system, illustrating how even partial lapses can spike delay costs for a day (Reuters).
Museums took visible hits. The Smithsonian reported closures beginning Jan 2, 2019, and national groups summarized larger nationwide losses for parks and cultural institutions (AAM).
Methodology
- Top-down lens uses CBO’s realized GDP loss from the 2018–2019 lapse and S&P’s pre-lapse weekly yardstick to bound a per-day range for broad shutdowns.
- Bottom-up lens adds sector components: federal payroll exposure, contractor idle time, aviation value-of-time, parks and museum spillovers, small-business credit timing, refund float, research pauses, spread effects and restart friction, each with a sourced anchor.
- Assumptions stay conservative where uncertain. Value-of-time uses USDOT BCA 2024. Debt spread math uses Treasury Debt to the Penny and basis-point deltas.
- Recoverability is labeled qualitatively. Budget back pay is paid later, but lost tourism, contractor hours and missed business meetings are often not recovered.
- Rounding keeps component math readable. Per-household figures divide daily ranges by the latest total household count from FRED.
References
- Congressional Budget Office, 2019 partial shutdown effects
- Office of Management and Budget, 2013 shutdown report
- GAO-20-201, Selected Agencies, 2020
- GAO-20-377, 2020
- USDOT Benefit-Cost Analysis Guidance, 2024 update
- BTS, average daily number of people screened by TSA
- IRS filing-season stats, week ending Mar 1, 2024 and week ending Mar 22, 2024
- BEA/Census FT900, July 2025 trade
- Census FT900, methodology PDF
- U.S. Treasury, Debt to the Penny
- American Alliance of Museums, economy and jobs
- Axios summary of S&P estimate
- Reuters, LaGuardia ground stop, Jan 2019
- ABC News citing U.S. Travel, 2013
- FRED, Total Households
Answers to Common Questions
How was the daily range derived?
By combining a top-down view from CBO’s 2019 analysis with bottom-up sector anchors such as USDOT value-of-time math, park and museum revenues and S&P’s full-scope yardstick, then adjusting for recoverability.
Which costs are usually repaid later?
Federal employee pay and many delayed purchases show up later on budget ledgers. Tourism spending, contractor hours and missed business travel are rarely recouped.
Do markets always suffer during shutdowns?
Short lapses often show muted moves, but prolonged brinkmanship can widen spreads. With public debt above $37T, even small spread changes scale quickly.
Why include parks and museums in a daily number?
They convert foot traffic into local sales every day; closures or partial openings erase spending that rarely returns. Several states have paid to keep gates open for this reason.
Is the per household number fair?
It is a communication device, not a tax bill, created by dividing the national daily impact by household count so the scale is tangible.
