Debt Maturity Distribution

When firms issue bonds, in theory they can be of any maturity. In practice they tend to be of longer maturities than, say, bank debt, although this is not always true. To give you an example, we have created the distribution of debt maturities for all bond issues (in SDC) from non-financial, non-governmental issuers (i.e. we excluded SIC codes 6000, 8200 and 9000) which were issued (sold) between 1986 and 2000. There were 9,204 issuances. The years to maturity have been rounded to the nearest quarter.

The average maturity is about 14 years (13.9 if we weight the issues equally, 14.6 if we weight by dollars). As you can see from Figure 1 (Bond Maturity (issue weighted)) and Figure 2 (Bond Maturity (dollar weighted)), the size of the issue is not correlated with the maturity.

Figure 1:

Figure 2:

In Figure 3, we have the same data as Figure 1, but presented as a pie chart. The ranges include the upper limit, but not the lower limit. Thus the range 3-5 years is bond issues which are greater than three years but less than or equal to 5 years. There are bonds with short maturities, but these are a small fraction of the sample. 7 percent of the issues have maturities of less than 3 years and 14% of less than 5 years. 4 percent of the issues have maturities over 30 years with the longest maturity being 101 years. The ranges 

Figure 3:

Figure 4: