Savings Bond Calculators: EE Series and More
U.S. Savings Bonds Calculator
The official U.S. Savings Bonds Calculator is provided by the Department of the Treasury. The Treasury has a retail website that allows people to buy U.S. Savings Bond directly from the U.S. government without any markup, spread, or commission. That website can be found at treasurydirect.gov. Note the .gov. It is not the same as the .com website.
On the home page of the Treasury Direct website, is a link to the Savings Bond Calculator. This feature can be uses on any of the standard savings bond series including, Series E, Series EE, and Series I savings bonds. The advantage of this online savings bond calculator is that it can be used for all savings bonds instead of having to use a specific EE Savings bond calculator for those type of bonds and a different savings bond calculator for Series I bonds.
Unlike other calculators, the bond value calculator at Treasury Direct does not require you to know the purchase date of the bonds, nor the interest rates of the savings bonds either. Rather, users simply enter the type of savings bond series, the denomination – the amount shown on the face of the bond, not the amount paid – and the serial number, and issue date. The online calculator does the rest, displaying the value of the bond and the amount of interest it has earned.
As an added feature, the TreasuryDirect calculator allows users to save an inventory of all their US Savings bonds which means that they can track the value of all the savings bonds they hold instead of having to re-enter several bonds each time they visit the website.
Of course, other online calculators exist for paper savings bonds as well. However, most of these calculators pull their data from the Treasury Department anyway, so it makes sense for most investors to go straight to the source and avoid the middle man. Plus, the Treasury’s bond calculator has no advertising or pop-ups to interfere with users getting the information they need quickly and efficiently.
If users are interested in building their own applications or have a spreadsheet template that calculates bond values directly, Savings Bond Value Files can also be downloaded directly from the TreasuryDirect.gov site. Navigate to the Tools section under the Individual part of the website to find these downloadable files. Historical savings bond value files are available back to May 1992 for interested users.
