What share of the federal debt would Texas have to take on?

That figure is a negotiation, not a bill, and Texas would negotiate it from real strength. By the methods international law actually recognizes, a good-faith reckoning can land at zero, because, as we argue below, what Washington owes Texans in earned benefits is larger than any share it could assign. This is about the federal debt, not a “national debt,” because the United States is not the nation here.

The opening demand, and why it is only an opening

Washington would open by demanding that Texas take a per-person slice of the federal debt, which on the tax-weighted measure is about $3.2 trillion. That number is not a settled liability. It is a starting position. No law sets Texas’s share. The only international instrument on the subject, the 1983 Vienna Convention on succession of state debts, has only seven parties, the United States not among them, and has never entered into force. Its rule that no debt passes unless the parties agree covers only “newly independent” former dependent territories. For part of a country that separates, as Texas would, it asks only for an unspecified “equitable proportion,” and even that gives way to whatever the two sides agree. There is no formula to hand down.

Even the starting percentage is a fight

The scholars who tried to build a formula could not agree on one. Texas is 8.2 percent of federal taxes paid, about 9.3 percent of the population, and about 9.5 percent of GDP, so the “share” swings by hundreds of billions before anyone argues method. Daniel Blum’s standard survey in the Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law lays out four recognized methods, each called “just” by someone, each landing in a completely different place, from a per-capita demand of trillions down to as low as zero for a net contributor under the historical-benefits method. We do not rest the case on the zero result. We rest it on the methods and arguments that hold regardless.

The decisive fact: net what each side owes the other

Here is what turns the debt question over. In any separation, what each side owes the other gets netted out, and the ledger does not run only one way. The Treasury’s own FY2025 financial report projects that Social Security, Medicare, and other social insurance programs will cost $88.4 trillion more than their dedicated revenue over the next 75 years, and Texans have paid into those programs for generations. Federal accounting does not count that shortfall as a liability of the government, but our position is that the benefits Texans earned are a claim Texas brings to the table, not a bill Texas owes. Either the checks keep flowing by agreement, which is cheaper for both sides, or those claims are weighed against any debt share Washington tries to assign.

Serious scholarship and history both point low

Professor Matt Qvortrup, who studies how new countries are actually formed, concludes an independent Texas would not be liable for the federal debt. The four-century-old doctrine of odious debt recognizes a category for debt “incurred to suppress secessionist movements,” and decolonizing nations walked away from colonial debts on exactly that principle. History is a muddle that cuts toward Texas: the United States took on none of Britain’s debt in 1783, Norway took none of Sweden’s in 1905, and South Sudan started debt-free in 2011 because Sudan kept all of it. There is no single rule, only a negotiation, and Texas brings energy, ports, and Washington’s own overriding interest in not detonating the Treasury market during a separation.

What is not negotiable is the bill Texans pay now

While the exit figure is contested, the cost of staying is not. Texans ship about $72 billion a year to Washington just in interest on this debt, plus about $150 billion a year in fresh borrowing, on an obligation that will never be repaid in a dollar that never stops shrinking. Staying is the expensive option. Leaving puts that outflow to a stop.

The bottom line

There is no fixed share. The figure Washington would invoice is an opening demand with no law behind it, and it would be weighed against the benefits Texans earned. A good-faith reckoning by recognized methods can land at zero, while the cost of staying runs to the hundreds of billions a year.