Trade Balance in Forex: The Two Releases and One Revision

The United States publishes two trade balances every month, and only one of them counts services. A calendar row reading Trade Balance says nothing about which report produced the number, which basis it sits on, or whether the figure beside it has already been revised. Reading the release settles all three, and each answer changes what the figure can honestly be compared against.

Two US Trade Balances Reach the Calendar Each Month

The Census Bureau publishes advance statistics on international trade in goods in the Advance Economic Indicators Report, alongside advance estimates of retail and wholesale inventories. Those trade statistics arrive between 24 and 26 calendar days from the close of the reference month, on average, and their coverage of goods trade is nearly complete.

The second balance arrives about a week and a half later. The FT-900, whose full title is U.S. International Trade in Goods and Services, is published jointly with the Bureau of Economic Analysis between 34 and 36 calendar days from that same point, and its coverage is complete rather than nearly complete.

The difference is not only timing. The Advance Report carries goods measured on a Census basis, grouped by principal end-use category, and nothing else on trade. Commodity detail, country detail, goods measured on a balance of payments basis and every services figure appear several days later in the FT-900.

That split has one consequence worth knowing. The FT-900 is the primary source of goods trade data behind quarterly gross domestic product, but for the advance GDP estimate the third month of the quarter has no FT-900 yet, so the Advance Report is used instead with adjustments applied to it.

What the Headline Figure Nets Against What

The headline is a single net number, and it hides two balances that do not have to move together. For June 2026, published on 4 August 2026, the deficit on goods and services came to 73.3 billion dollars, down 4.4 billion from a revised 77.6 billion in May.

Underneath that: the goods deficit fell 3.9 billion dollars to 102.1 billion, and the services surplus rose 0.5 billion to 28.8 billion. The United States ran a deficit of 102.1 billion and a surplus of 28.8 billion in the same month, and the calendar printed the difference.

Total exports were 314.7 billion dollars and total imports 388.0 billion. Of that, goods exports were 206.9 billion against goods imports of 309.0 billion, while services exports were 107.8 billion against services imports of 79.0 billion.

A reader who treats the headline as a goods number is out by roughly 29 billion dollars a month on that release. A reader who treats a narrowing headline as evidence that exports rose is on shakier ground still, because in June both exports and imports fell and imports simply fell further.

The composition matters for currency work for the same reason it matters for the number itself. An economy whose surplus sits in services and whose deficit sits in goods responds to different price moves than one whose balance is dominated by a handful of shipped commodities, which is the distinction behind export shares rather than currency labels.

Census Basis and Balance of Payments Basis Sit in One Report

The FT-900 carries a qualifier that is easy to read past: except where a table says otherwise, its figures sit on a balance of payments basis. That qualifier is doing real work, because the same report also publishes goods on a Census basis, and the two are not the same measurement.

Census basis figures come from the customs documentation of goods crossing the border. The Bureau of Economic Analysis then adjusts them to a balance of payments basis to match the concepts used in the national and international accounts.

Those adjustments cover changes in ownership that happen without goods entering or leaving the customs territory, remove transactions already recorded elsewhere in the accounts, and value transactions on a standard definition.

The adjustment is visible as its own line rather than buried in the totals. In the June 2026 release the net balance of payments adjustments reduced both exports and imports by 0.2 billion dollars each.

Country detail is where this bites a reader. Exhibit 19 gives trade in goods by country on a Census basis. Exhibit 20 gives goods and services by country on a balance of payments basis, exhibit 20a gives goods alone on that basis, and exhibit 20b gives services. A bilateral figure quoted without naming its exhibit is a figure whose construct is unknown.

The Census basis country figures for June 2026, in exhibit 19, show goods deficits with Vietnam of 21.6 billion dollars, Mexico 20.3 billion, China 15.3 billion and Taiwan 14.9 billion, and goods surpluses with the Netherlands of 7.2 billion, Hong Kong 3.2 billion and Switzerland 2.9 billion. None of those figures includes services with the same partner, because services by country live in a different exhibit on a different basis.

Seasonal Adjustment Applies to the Headline, Not to Everything in the Release

Every statistic quoted in the FT-900 narrative is seasonally adjusted. The release says so directly, and it points readers to the exhibits for anything else.

The exhibits are organised on exactly that division. Exhibits 12 through 18 are the not seasonally adjusted group, and they include the country tables in exhibits 14 and 14a, the SITC commodity detail in exhibit 15 and the advanced technology products tables. Exhibits 19 through 20b are seasonally adjusted by geography.

So one report can show the same country twice, once adjusted and once not, and a figure lifted from the wrong table will not reconcile with the headline no matter how carefully it is added up.

The adjustment itself is not applied to the total. It is made at the most detailed end-use commodity level where significant stable seasonality is identified, and those adjusted details are then summed to produce the published aggregates.

Two consequences follow from that method. Where no stable seasonal pattern is found in a detailed series, no adjustment is made to it, so the adjusted total is a sum of adjusted and unadjusted components rather than a single correction applied at the top.

Petroleum imports are additionally adjusted for the length of the month, and the Census Bureau notes that aircraft series move so variably that they may be worth analysing separately from the rest of the data. Neither of those refinements is visible in the headline number a calendar prints.

The Figure You Traded Is Revised in the Next Release

Each monthly release revises the previous month. The Census Bureau revises the aggregate seasonally adjusted and unadjusted exports, imports and trade balance, in nominal and chained dollars, along with the end-use totals for that prior month.

The June 2026 release did exactly that to May. May goods exports were revised up 0.3 billion dollars and services exports down 0.4 billion, while goods imports were revised down 0.2 billion and services imports up 0.2 billion. The May headline deficit is printed as 77.6 billion, marked revised.

Two limits on that are easy to miss. Country detail and commodity detail on the SITC and NAICS classifications are not revised monthly at all, so the bilateral figure in last month release stands unchanged while the total beside it moves. And the real, chained-dollar series carry revisions to the previous five months whenever the underlying price indexes are revised.

Larger revisions arrive on a schedule. Every June the unadjusted goods series is reworked so that transactions which arrived too late land in the month they belong to, and the seasonal and trading-day factors are recalculated at the same time. This is the same pattern that governs what is final on release and what is not in the price statistics, and the same reason a figure can be revised after you have already traded it.

Trade Balance Is Not the Current Account

The goods and services balance feeds into the current account, but it is not the whole of it. Goods measured on a balance of payments basis, together with services, are folded quarterly and annually into the international transactions accounts, which the Bureau of Economic Analysis publishes in March, June, September and December.

The first quarter of 2026 shows why the distinction is not academic. The current-account deficit widened by 5.8 billion dollars to 226.8 billion, a rise of 2.6 percent, against a revised fourth-quarter figure of 221.1 billion. Measured against gross domestic product in current dollars, it equalled 2.9 percent, where the quarter before had been 2.8 percent.

What moved it was not trade. The widening came from the primary income balance, which flipped: a surplus in the closing quarter of 2025 became a deficit in the opening quarter of 2026. A smaller deficit on goods offset part of that. Goods improved while the current account got worse.

The scale differs too. Exports of goods and services plus income received from foreign residents came to 1.38 trillion dollars in the quarter, against 1.61 trillion of imports and income paid. Anyone reasoning from the balance of payments toward what actually moves a floating currency is working with the larger account, not the monthly trade headline.

The same quarterly release also reports the net international investment position, which stood at minus 21.27 trillion dollars as at the close of the first quarter of 2026. That is a stock of assets and liabilities measured at a point in time, while the trade balance and the current account are flows measured over a period, and the three are routinely quoted as though they were interchangeable.

What a Calendar Row Can and Cannot Tell You

A calendar row carries a number, a month and usually a consensus figure beside it. Why price responds to the gap between the two rather than to the level is set out in our guide to why price reacts to the deviation rather than the number, and it is not repeated here.

What the row does not carry is the identity of the release. It rarely says whether the entry is the goods-only advance figure or the full goods and services balance, which basis the number sits on, whether the prior month was revised, or whether the country breakdown behind it was adjusted.

The underlying statistics carry known coverage limits as well, and they are published rather than hidden. Transactions valued at or below 2,500 dollars for exports and 2,000 dollars for imports, with a 250 dollar threshold for certain quota items, are estimated rather than counted individually.

The Census Bureau also states that not all required export documents are filed, and that late-arriving transactions may land in a later month. United States exports to Canada are compiled from Canadian import records rather than from filings on this side of the border, an arrangement the two countries run by agreement.

None of that makes the series unreliable. It does mean the figure is an estimate built from administrative records with published gaps, and a reader who treats a small month-on-month change as a signal is reading past the compilation notes that the same release supplies.

Checking the Figure Against the Release Yourself

Five steps settle almost every question a trade balance figure raises, and none of them needs anything beyond the two published releases.

• Identify the report. Goods only means the Advance Economic Indicators Report; goods and services means the FT-900.
• Count the days from the end of the reference month. Roughly 24 to 26 points at the advance figure, roughly 34 to 36 at the full release.
• Look for the word revised beside the prior month before comparing two months against each other.
• Name the exhibit behind any bilateral figure, and check whether it is Census basis or balance of payments basis, adjusted or unadjusted.
• Keep the monthly trade balance separate from the quarterly current account, which includes income flows that trade figures do not.