When people ask how much money exists in the United States, M2 is usually the answer they're given. It counts the money that households and businesses can spend readily: physical currency, balances in checking and savings accounts, retail money market funds, and small certificates of deposit. As of the latest reading, M2 stands at roughly $23 trillion, growing a few percent year over year.
What's included
M2 is built in layers. It starts with M1 — currency in circulation plus checking and other liquid deposits, including savings accounts. To that, M2 adds two categories that are slightly less spendable but still close to cash: small-denomination time deposits (CDs under $100,000) and balances in retail money market funds. The logic is liquidity: everything in M2 can be converted to spendable form quickly and at little or no cost.
What's left out
M2 excludes things people sometimes assume are "money": stocks, bonds, home equity, institutional money market funds, and large time deposits. Those are wealth, not money — they must be sold to someone before they can be spent. Also excluded are bank reserves held at the Fed, which belong to a different measure (the monetary base) and cannot be spent by the public at all. This distinction matters when interpreting central bank actions: the Fed creating reserves is not the same thing as M2 rising, a point covered in the QE explainer.
How and when it's measured
The Fed publishes M2 in its H.6 statistical release. The headline series most people quote is monthly and seasonally adjusted (FRED code M2SL); a weekly, non-seasonally-adjusted series (WM2NS) offers the finest available resolution. Daily money supply data does not exist — weekly is as granular as official measurement gets. New data is generally released Tuesdays at 1:00 p.m. ET. One definitional note: in May 2020 the Fed reclassified savings deposits into M1 after Regulation D's transfer limits were suspended, which is why charts of M1 show an enormous one-time jump that year. M2 was unaffected, since savings deposits were already inside it.
Why it's watched
M2 is the denominator behind every dollar you hold. When it grows much faster than the economy's output, each existing dollar becomes a smaller claim on that output — a dilution you can compute for your own numbers with the money supply calculator. The relationship between M2 growth and consumer price inflation is real but loose over short horizons, and the 2020s offered a vivid case study: M2 grew more than 25% year over year in early 2021, the fastest on record, and the highest inflation in four decades followed in 2022. Whether one caused the other is examined in Does Printing Money Cause Inflation?
Related reading
M0, M1, M2, M3: The Money Aggregates Explained · The Velocity of Money · Current M2 data and charts