Total debt is the full amount of interest-bearing borrowings a company owes, combining both short-term and long-term obligations. It captures everything the business must eventually repay to lenders — bonds, notes, loans, commercial paper, and lease obligations — regardless of when those payments come due. It is the starting point for most leverage analysis and the gross figure from which net debt is derived.
Total debt matters because it defines the scale of a company's fixed financial commitments. Two companies can report the same equity, but the one carrying far more total debt has less flexibility, higher interest costs, and more sensitivity to rising rates or falling revenue.
Total Debt = Reported Total Debt, or Short-Term Debt + Long-Term Debt
GeminIQ prefers the total-debt figure a company reports directly on its balance sheet. When a filer does not report debt as a single combined line, GeminIQ sums Short-Term Debt and Long-Term Debt from its canonical mapping — which includes current maturities of long-term debt, commercial paper, revolving credit, and finance and operating lease obligations. All inputs come from XBRL-tagged SEC filings. Net Debt is then computed as Total Debt − Cash and Cash Equivalents.
A: Total debt is the gross amount of borrowings a company owes. Net debt subtracts cash and cash equivalents, showing what would remain if the company used its available cash to pay down debt. A company with large cash reserves can have high total debt but low — or even negative — net debt.
A: GeminIQ's total debt includes short-term borrowings, the current portion of long-term debt, long-term notes and bonds, and lease liabilities (finance and operating). It reflects interest-bearing and lease obligations rather than all liabilities such as accounts payable or deferred revenue.
A: Companies present debt differently — some report a single total, others break it into many line items, and treatment of leases and current maturities varies. GeminIQ uses the reported total when available and otherwise reconstructs it by summing canonical short-term and long-term debt, so the figure may differ from any single label in the filing.
Now put it to work. Screen every US public company by Total Debt.
Start 7-Day Free Trial →