What Is Long-Term Debt?
Long-term debt is money a company owes that does not have to be repaid within the next year: bonds, term loans and similar borrowings. It is a claim that must be serviced with interest and eventually repaid, whatever trading conditions do.
Debt is neither good nor bad in itself. Borrowed money that earns more than its interest cost makes owners better off, and stable, cash-generative businesses can safely carry debt that would crush a volatile one. The danger is mismatch: heavy debt against unstable earnings, or repayment dates concentrated in a period when markets may be closed to refinancing.
Readers judge debt in context, never alone. Compare it with cash on hand — net debt subtracts the cash — with stockholders' equity, and with operating cash flow, which shows how many years of cash generation the debt represents. The company pages on this site place all of those figures in a single table for exactly this comparison.
Filings add essential detail that headline figures hide: maturity schedules showing when debt falls due, interest rates, and covenants that restrict the company if performance weakens. A modest debt total falling due next year can be riskier than a large one spread over twenty years, which is why the notes to the accounts deserve as much attention as the balance sheet itself.
Putting it into practice
Interest cost is the other half of the debt story. The income statement's interest expense, divided by average debt, approximates the price a company pays for borrowing, and comparing that price with the return the borrowed money earns is the essence of leverage analysis. Strong credits borrow cheaply and can carry more debt safely; weak credits pay more for less safety. Filings also disclose fair-value estimates and refinancing activity in the debt note, so a reader who stops at the balance-sheet total misses both the cost and the calendar of the obligation — the two things that determine whether it is dangerous.
A worked example from a real filing
Abstract definitions stick better with a real number attached. Take Nvidia Corp (NVDA): in fiscal 2026 it reported revenue of $215.94 billion in its annual 10-K filing, as republished in the SEC EDGAR company facts dataset retrieved in October 2026. Open its company page and you can place that figure next to the same company's net income, operating cash flow, total assets and diluted earnings per share for the same year — the relationships between the measures, not any single one of them, are where understanding lives. Then compare it with peers in the rankings, where the same measures are lined up across the largest filers.
For the full set of plain-English explainers, return to the Learn index, and for exactly how this site selects and labels figures, read the methodology page.