The Czech Republic Government Debt Management Annual Report 2024
Ministry of Finance presents to the public, in accordance with the calendar of published information for the first half of 2025 planned within the Czech Republic Funding and Debt Management Strategy for 2025 published on 6 January 2025, the Czech Republic Government Debt Management Annual Report for 2024. It contains a more detailed evaluation of the dynamics and structure of state debt, issuance activity of state on the primary government bond market and operations of the Ministry of Finance on the secondary government bond market, the development and the structure of expenditure on state debt service, the evaluation of financial risks and debt portfolio risk management.
It also includes an annual evaluation of primary dealers of Czech government securities, with the following three primary dealers formally confirmed as the most active in the overall evaluation for 2024: PPF banka a.s., KBC Bank NV / Československá obchodní banka, a. s. and Société Générale / Komerční banka, a.s.
As it was already preliminarily announced on 6 January 2025 during the presentation of the results of the state budget for 2024, the absolute value of the state debt reached CZK 3,365.2 billion at the end of 2024, which represents an increase of CZK 254.3 billion compared to the end of 2023. In relative terms to gross domestic product, there was a year-on-year increase from 40.8% to 42.0%.
The financing of gross borrowing requirement, which amounted to CZK 511.2 billion in 2024, was carried out mainly through the sale of CZK-denominated medium-term and long-term government bonds on the domestic bond market through auctions organised by the Czech National Bank, which continued to represent the primary source of the Czech Republic’s financing needs and accounted for approximately 90% of total state debt. The gross issue of CZK-denominated medium-term and long-term government bonds on the primary and secondary markets amounted to CZK 376.0 billion, of which CZK 20.7 billion was in the form of variable-rate government bonds.
The average time to maturity of newly sold CZK-denominated government bonds was 10.4 years and the average yield to maturity of newly sold CZK-denominated fixed-rate government bonds was 3.95% p.a. The average time to maturity of the total state debt reached the level of 6.3 years at the end of 2024, thus moving towards the set medium-term target for this aggregate parameter of refinancing risk of the state debt portfolio. As part of the refinancing risk, the indicator of the average time to maturity after taking into account the total available state treasury liquidity against the nearest state debt redemptions is also monitored. There is not set medium-term target value for this adjusted indicator of the average time to maturity. However, by the end of 2024, the level of this adjusted indicator amounted to 7.2 years, which confirms that the refinancing and liquidity position of the Czech Republic remains stable. This is also reflected in the share of state debt with maturity within one year, which remained below 10% for the second year in row. The share of net foreign currency exposure of the state debt also declined slightly to 5.2% last year.