BIS OTC Derivatives: $844.6T Notional Outstanding
$844.6 trillion in OTC derivatives notional outstanding as of H2 2025, up 20.7% year-on-year, per BIS semi-annual survey data.
Data
| Period | Total (USD tn) | Interest Rate (USD tn) | FX (USD tn) | Equity (USD tn) | CDS (USD tn) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| H2 2025 | 844.6 | 669.5 | 148.7 | 11.9 | 11.3 |
| H1 2025 | 845.7 | 665.8 | 155.2 | 10.4 | 11.3 |
| H2 2024 | 699.5 | 548.3 | 130.1 | 8.9 | 9.2 |
| H1 2024 | 729.5 | 578.8 | 129.9 | 8.7 | 9.2 |
| H2 2023 | 667.1 | 529.8 | 118 | 7.8 | 8.7 |
| H1 2023 | 712.9 | 573.6 | 118.5 | 7.8 | 10.1 |
| H2 2022 | 618 | 490.6 | 107.6 | 6.9 | 9.9 |
| H1 2022 | 632.1 | 502.5 | 109.6 | 7 | 9.5 |
| H2 2021 | 598.4 | 475.3 | 104.2 | 7.3 | 9.1 |
| H1 2021 | 610 | 488.1 | 102.5 | 7.5 | 9.1 |
| H2 2020 | 582.1 | 466.5 | 97.5 | 7.1 | 8.6 |
About this Dataset
The global over-the-counter derivatives market stood at $844.6 trillion in notional outstanding as of December 2025 — a figure that exceeds global GDP by more than eight times over and represents the single largest financial market by reference amount. The H2 2025 reading marks a 20.7% increase from $699.5 trillion a year earlier, though it is essentially unchanged from the $845.7 trillion recorded in H1 2025, following the sharp expansion in interest rate derivatives that took place earlier in the year as financial institutions repositioned duration exposure through the global rate-cutting cycle. The previous all-time high before this cycle was $729.5 trillion, set in H1 2024; the December 2025 figure remains roughly 15.8% above that prior peak.
Notional outstanding is not a measure of loss exposure. It is the reference amount on which derivative payments are calculated, not the capital at risk — for a $100 million interest rate swap, the cash flows actually exchanged are only the difference between fixed and floating rates on that notional, a small fraction of the headline figure. The $844.6 trillion outstanding as of H2 2025 is best read as a gauge of market activity and interconnectedness, not of systemic loss potential.
Interest rate derivatives remain the dominant instrument class at $669.5 trillion, representing 79.3% of total notional. This reflects the fundamental economics of global capital markets: every multi-year fixed-rate bond, every variable-rate corporate loan, and every cross-border funding transaction creates a natural hedge demand that is overwhelmingly expressed through interest rate swaps and forward rate agreements. Foreign exchange derivatives — the second-largest category at $148.7 trillion — capture the hedging requirements of the $7 trillion daily spot FX market, where importers, exporters, asset managers, and central banks manage currency exposure through forwards and FX swaps with tenors from overnight to multi-year. Credit default swaps stood at $11.3 trillion in H2 2025, essentially unchanged from H1 2025 and up from $8.6 trillion in H2 2020, the earliest period in this series — a segment that remains far smaller than interest rate and FX derivatives, consistent with the post-2008 wind-down of the structured credit boom and ongoing compression of legacy single-name positions.
- Dataset: BIS WS_OTC_DERIV2, semi-annual survey of major derivatives dealers globally
- Reporting basis: Net-gross (single-counted) — each contract is counted once rather than for both counterparties; DER_BASIS=C in the SDMX key
- Instrument coverage: Interest rate (forwards, swaps, options), foreign exchange (spot excluded), equity-linked, commodity, and credit derivatives
- Currency: All values reported in USD millions; converted to USD trillions (÷ 1,000,000) for this page
- Temporal coverage: 1998 H1 through 2025 H2; reporting country coverage: all BIS reporting countries (5J code)
- Central clearing: A majority of standardised interest rate derivatives notional is now cleared through central counterparties (CCPs), up from near-zero before the 2009 G20 Pittsburgh commitment
The post-2008 trajectory of the market illustrates the effect of regulatory reform on structure, if not on scale. The 2009 Pittsburgh G20 commitment to mandatory central clearing — implemented through Dodd-Frank Title VII in the US and EMIR in the EU — did not reduce the volume of derivatives activity. Notional outstanding bottomed at $594.5 trillion in H1 2009 and has grown by roughly 42% since. What changed fundamentally was counterparty risk architecture: CCP clearing for standardised swaps means that dealer default no longer propagates bilaterally across the market, as it did when Lehman Brothers' derivatives book required a multi-month unwinding process across hundreds of counterparties. The residual risk concentration in a small number of systemically important CCPs — LCH SwapClear alone clears the majority of global interest rate swap notional — has made CCP stress testing and default waterfall adequacy the central financial stability concern in derivatives markets.
For fixed income portfolio managers and rates desks, the sharp 2025 expansion in notional outstanding is a direct indicator of the volume of curve repositioning that occurred as major central banks pivoted from hiking to cutting cycles. Large moves in swap notional typically precede or accompany significant duration shifts in institutional bond portfolios — the roughly $121 trillion year-on-year increase in IR derivatives between H2 2024 and H2 2025 is consistent with the scale of rate risk transfer that characterised the easing cycle across the Fed, ECB, and Bank of England, even as the pace of growth has since levelled off.
Related BIS data: International Debt Securities · Total Credit to Private Non-Financial Sector · Effective Exchange Rates · Debt Service Ratios · Central Bank Policy Rates