How Much Will Your Treasury Bill Earn?
Ghana's treasury bills are the country's default savings instrument, and the Bank of Ghana auctions them every week. At the 20 July 2026 auction the 91-day paid 5.78%, the 182-day 7.68% and the 364-day 13.00% — an unusually steep curve that pays you more than seven percentage points extra to lock your money for a year. This page carries the live auction rates and does the arithmetic honestly: what a given amount actually earns, what you must invest to hit an income target, and how rolling short bills compares with locking long. It is an educational calculator, not financial advice.
91-day
auction 2026-07-20
364-day
lock for a year
Curve spread
364-day over 91-day
Real return, 364d
after 5.3% inflation
91-day
5.78%
discount 5.70%-0.08pp
182-day
7.68%
discount 7.39%-0.11pp
364-day
13.00%
discount 11.50%+0.00pp
Bank of Ghana auction issued 2026-07-20. Change shown is versus the previous week's auction. Rates reset weekly.
This is an educational calculator, not financial advice. Rates shown are the Bank of Ghana's published weekly auction results (source: bog.gov.gh) and change every week. The rate your bank executes may differ slightly, and banks may apply their own minimums or charges. Tax treatment shown reflects the statutory position for resident individuals — confirm your own situation with the GRA or your bank. Past rates do not predict future rates. accra.cool is not a licensed investment advisor and does not recommend any investment, tenor, or institution. Verify current rates at bog.gov.gh before investing.
The calculator
Enter an amount and pick a tenor — the rate fills from this week's auction. Override it if your bank quoted you something different.
Auto-filled from the Bank of Ghana auction. Resident individuals are exempt on government securities; tick the box to see the net if withholding applies to you.
Value at maturity (91 days)
₵10,144.22
Interest earned ₵144.22
| You invest | ₵10,000.00 |
| Rate × 91/365 | 5.7845% |
| Gross interest | ₵144.22 |
| At maturity | ₵10,144.22 |
Real return is the annualised rate less inflation of 5.3% (our price data).
Assumes the published Bank of Ghana auction rate; your bank's executed rate may differ slightly. Ghana uses an actual/365 day count, so a 364-day bill earns 364/365 of the annual rate.
Work it backwards
Know the amount you want at maturity? This is what you pay today, on the discount basis your bank quotes.
Invest today
₵9,857.84
At the 91-day discount rate of 5.7020%, that matures back to ₵10,000.01 — a gain of ₵142.17.
This is the discount basis: price = face × (1 − discount × 91/365). It is the number your bank quotes as the purchase price of the bill.
Income target
The other way round: how much do you need invested to draw a set income every cycle?
You would need invested
₵34,670
to draw ₵500 every 91 days at 5.7845% — about ₵2,005 a year across 4.0 cycles.
Assumes you reinvest the principal each cycle at the same rate and draw only the interest. Rates reset at every auction, so the income moves with them — this is the arithmetic, not a guarantee.
Roll short or lock long?
The same money over roughly a year, three ways, at today's curve.
| Strategy | Rate used | Return over ~1yr | On ₵10,000.00 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Roll 91-day × 4364 days | 5.7845% | +5.89% | ₵589.46 |
| Roll 182-day × 2364 days | 7.6763% | +7.80% | ₵780.18 |
| Lock 364-day × 1· highest at today's curve364 days | 12.9954% | +12.96% | ₵1,295.98 |
Assumes rates stay where they are — they won't.This shows the tradeoff at today's curve, not a prediction. For rolling short to beat locking long, short rates would have to rise substantially and soon. We are not recommending a tenor.
Why the 364-day pays so much more right now
The shape of Ghana's yield curve today is unusual and worth understanding before you choose a tenor. The 91-day bill pays 5.78%; the 364-day pays 13.00%. That is a gap of more than seven percentage points for locking the same money up for a year instead of three months — far wider than the modest premium a term structure normally carries. There are two readings, and honest people hold both.
The first is expectation: the market may be pricing in that short rates stay low or fall further as disinflation continues, in which case locking the long bill captures a yield that will not be available again soon.
The second is term premium: lenders demand extra compensation for tying money up for a year in an economy that, within recent memory, ran 54% inflation and restructured its domestic bonds — the risk of being wrong over twelve months is simply worth more. Which reading is right determines whether locking is clever or costly, and nobody knows.
What the ladder tool below does is make the tradeoff arithmetic explicit: at today's rates, rolling the 91-day four times compounds to about 5.9% over the year, against 12.96% for the single 364-day. For the roll to win, short rates would have to rise substantially and soon. That is the comparison; the decision is yours.
— accra.cool desk
Rate history
91-day
38 auctions
35.57% → 5.78%
-29.78pp
182-day
34 auctions
36.53% → 7.68%
-28.85pp
364-day
33 auctions
32.08% → 13.00%
-19.09pp
Bank of Ghana auction results, real published rows only — no interpolated points. The path down was not smooth: the 91-day peaked near 35.7% in February 2023, fell sharply once the domestic debt exchange completed, drifted back up through the second half of 2024, then dropped through two steep falls in early 2025 and early 2026 as inflation collapsed. May 2026 is absent because those auction notices were not retrievable — we leave the gap rather than fill it.
How the rates got here
Today's 5.78% on the 91-day is startling only if you remember where it came from. Through the 2022–23 debt crisis, treasury bill yields ran up into the mid-thirties: the 91-day weighted-average peaked at 35.75% at the auction of 3 February 2023, on a plateau that had held near 35.5% since late November 2022, while the 182-day touched 36.5% that December. The break is precisely dated.
On 24 February 2023 the 91-day still cleared at 35.55%; by 7 March it was 24.16% — the Domestic Debt Exchange Programme had completed. That programme restructured domestic bonds but deliberately excluded treasury bills, which is why bills, not bonds, became the instrument savers and institutions were willing to hold, and why the government's borrowing calendar is still dominated by them.
What followed was not the smooth glide the story is usually told as. Yields kept easing through the first half of 2024, to about 24.8% in July, then drifted back up through the second half of that year to 28.4% by January 2025 — a real reversal, not a blip.
The collapse came in two steps after that: a fall from 26.9% to 15.9% between February and March 2025, and a second from 8.6% to 4.7% between February and March 2026, as inflation came down to the current 5.3%. The short end fell furthest, which is exactly why the curve is so steep today. Every point on our chart is a published auction; where we could not retrieve the notices, in May 2026, we leave the gap rather than draw through it.
— accra.cool desk
T-bills against inflation: the real return
A nominal rate on its own tells you very little. What matters is what is left after inflation has taken its cut, and this is where the tenor choice stops being academic. Ghana's consumer inflation ran at 5.3% year-on-year in June 2026. Against that, the 91-day bill's 5.78% is a real return of roughly half a percentage point — you are, in practical terms, treading water, preserving purchasing power and very little more.
The 364-day's 13.00%, against the same 5.3%, is a real return near 7.7 percentage points, which is a genuinely strong riskless return by any standard and the best Ghanaian savers have seen in years. The catch is the obvious one: that 7.7 points assumes inflation stays near where it is for the whole year. If prices reaccelerate, the real return compresses, and the twelve-month lock that looked clever becomes ordinary.
This is the single most useful frame we can offer, and it is one we can compute because we track the price data ourselves — the food basket behind the inflation number is on our prices page. Look at both figures together, not the headline rate alone.
— accra.cool desk
Discount rate vs interest rate: the two numbers explained
Every Bank of Ghana auction publishes two figures for each tenor and they are not the same number, which is the single most common confusion in this market. The discount rate is the rate applied to the face value to work out what you pay today; the interest rate is the yield on the money you actually hand over. Take the 20 July 91-day bill.
The discount rate is 5.7020%, so a bill with a face value of ₵10,000 costs you ₵10,000 × (1 − 0.057020 × 91/365) = ₵9,857.84 today, and pays out ₵10,000 in ninety-one days. Your actual return is the ₵142.16 gain on the ₵9,857.84 you parted with, which annualises to 5.78% — the published interest rate. The two are tied together by a fixed relationship: interest = discount ÷ (1 − discount × t/365).
Run the numbers and 5.7020 becomes 5.784, matching the published 5.7845 to within rounding. We check that identity on every rate we ingest, which is a free test of whether the data is sound. The practical takeaway: quote the interest rate when you compare savings products, because that is the one you can compare with a fixed deposit or a savings account. The discount rate only tells you the purchase price.
— accra.cool desk
How buying actually works
Treasury bills are bought through the banking system rather than direct from the Bank of Ghana counter. Any universal bank will do it — GCB, Ecobank, Absa, Stanbic, Standard Chartered among others — as will primary dealers and brokers such as Databank and the investment arms of the banks.
The mechanics run on a weekly cycle: you place a bid through your bank during the week, the auction is held on Friday, and the successful bills are issued the following Monday, which is why the rate table on this page is dated by Monday issue dates.
The Bank of Ghana's official minimum is ₵100, but individual banks and brokers set their own practical minimums and these are often considerably higher, so ask before you plan around the floor. At maturity the proceeds are credited back to your account, and most institutions will let you set a standing instruction to roll the bill automatically into the next auction.
If you need the money before maturity you are not strictly locked in — bills can be rediscounted, effectively sold back early — but you will give up some of the return to do it, so treat the tenor you choose as a real commitment. We name these institutions because they are the channels that exist, not as a recommendation of any one of them.
— accra.cool desk
Is the interest taxed?
This is where the advice online contradicts itself, sometimes on the same website, so it is worth quoting the statute. Under section 7(1)(p) of the Income Tax Act 2015 (Act 896), inserted by the Income Tax (Amendment) Act 2016, interest paid to an individual by a resident financial institution, or on bonds issued by the Government of Ghana, is exempt from income tax.
Nothing is withheld from a resident individual's treasury bill interest, and the Ghana Revenue Authority's own withholding table confirms it from the other direction: the 8% rate on interest is scoped to payments "excluding individuals and resident financial institutions".
One widely repeated claim needs correcting, and we published it ourselves before checking the statute properly: the same paragraph also exempts ordinary bank interest for individuals, so a fixed deposit is not taxed at 8% either.
Treasury bills may still suit you better than a deposit — on the rate, on the tenor, on who stands behind the money — but the advantage is not a tax advantage, and anyone telling you otherwise is repeating a myth. Where the 8% does bite is companies and other non-individual holders, and even there it is not a final tax: the interest is folded into chargeable income at the corporate rate and the 8% is credited against the bill.
That is what the tax toggle on the calculator is for. Two caveats worth carrying. A consolidated copy of Act 896 annotates paragraph (p) as having been deleted in 2016; reading the amending Act shows it removed only the word "and" to make room for new paragraphs, and the exemption is intact — do not let that footnote talk you out of it.
And tax law moves with each budget: the 2026 budget did not touch interest income, though it does signal a wider rewrite of the Income Tax Act, so the treatment stored here carries its source and effective date and we will update it if it changes. Confirm your own position with the GRA or your bank rather than any website, this one included.
— accra.cool desk
How to buy, in 60 seconds
Any universal bank branch or bank app, a broker, or a mobile-money route — with a valid ID, and a bank account for the bank channels but not for a broker. Your bid goes into the weekly auction. The step that catches people out is the CSD account: the app route usually needs one branch visit first.
| Channel | Minimum | Needs |
|---|---|---|
| Bank branch | ₵500indicative | A bank account and valid photo ID |
| Bank mobile app | —indicative | A CSD account registered at a branch first, then the bank app |
| Broker / investment house | ₵500verified | Two passport photographs and valid ID — passport, driver's licence, Voter's ID or SSNIT card. Forms completed in branch or emailed to you. |
| Mobile money | ₵100indicative | A mobile money account |
| Primary dealer, direct | ₵50,000indicative | A dealer relationship |
Minimums are indicative unless badged otherwise — confirm with the institution. No institution is recommended. The full guide, with the CSD account and maturity instructions →
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Common questions
- At the Bank of Ghana auction issued 2026-07-20, the 91-day bill pays 5.7845%, the 182-day 7.6763% and the 364-day 12.9954%. Rates are set at a weekly auction, so they change every Monday.
Have a question we should answer? Email hello@accra.cool.
This is an educational calculator, not financial advice. Rates shown are the Bank of Ghana's published weekly auction results (source: bog.gov.gh) and change every week. The rate your bank executes may differ slightly, and banks may apply their own minimums or charges. Tax treatment shown reflects the statutory position for resident individuals — confirm your own situation with the GRA or your bank. Past rates do not predict future rates. accra.cool is not a licensed investment advisor and does not recommend any investment, tenor, or institution. Verify current rates at bog.gov.gh before investing.