Ghana Treasury Bill Rates, and What They Actually Pay You

Government of Ghana weekly auction, tender 2024, dated 14 September 2026. The comparison column is tender 2023, dated 7 September 2026. Both from the Bank of Ghana auction results. A new tender is published every week.

Look at the shape of that curve. The one-year bill pays about 2.2 times the three-month bill. That is a steep term premium, and it tells you the market wants to be paid well to lend to the government for longer. It also means rolling 91-day bills for a year would leave you well short of simply buying the 364-day bill, if rates hold.

And rates have not held. In early July 2026 these same bills paid 5.87%, 7.79% and 12.93%. The 364-day bill has given up 2.83 percentage points since then and the 91-day 1.17 points. If you are judging a savings product against a T-bill number you read a couple of months ago, you are comparing it against a rate that no longer exists.

Inflation was 5.0% in August 2026. A 364-day bill at 10.1017% is therefore paying you about 4.9 percentage points above inflation in real terms. That is still a genuinely good real return, and by Ghana's own recent history it is notable: for most of 2023 inflation ran far ahead of what bills paid, and savers lost money in real terms every year. But it is roughly half the cushion the same bill offered in mid-2026, when the rate was near 13% and inflation near 3%.

Now set that against what a bank pays on a savings account. The last time the Bank of Ghana published an average savings deposit rate it was 6.25%, and that series has not been updated since April 2023. Even taking that stale figure at face value, the government is paying roughly 1.6 times what your savings account does, for money you can lock away for a year.

That is the argument for a Treasury bill over a savings account, and it is why T-bill auctions in Ghana are routinely oversubscribed. The trade-offs are real though, and worth stating plainly:

• Your money is locked up for the term. A savings account is not.
• Rates are falling. They eased again week on week in September and are well down on July. When your bill matures you reinvest at whatever the rate is then, which on the current trend will be lower. Locking in the 364-day bill is a bet that today's rate beats next year's, and on that trend the bet looks better than it did.
• It is not risk free, it is government risk. Ghana restructured its domestic debt in 2023 and holders of local bonds took losses. Treasury bills were excluded from that exchange, which is exactly why they are trusted, but "excluded last time" is not the same as "guaranteed next time".

Through a commercial bank or a licensed broker. You place a bid ahead of the weekly auction, and you can bid competitively (naming your rate) or non-competitively (taking the accepted rate). Most individuals bid non-competitively. The minimum is small, typically a few hundred cedis, and it varies by institution, so ask.

At maturity the government pays back your principal plus the interest. You can instruct the bank to roll it over automatically into a new bill, which most regular buyers do.