Hidden in plain sight: the US starts counting what companies spend on their own data
A new estimate from the US national accounts treats a company's own data as an investment. The sums are large, and almost none of it shows on a company's balance sheet.
Picture made for ABURA Bureau.
In March 2026 the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, the agency that compiles the country's GDP, published experimental estimates of something its accounts have never counted: the data companies collect and organise for their own use. Until now the cost of gathering and keeping that data was treated as a running expense, gone as soon as it was spent. Under the new method it becomes an investment, an asset that keeps paying back for years, in the same way software and research already are.
The numbers are large. By the agency's estimate, US businesses invested $875 billion in their own data and databases in 2024, up from $205 billion in 1997. The value of the stock built up over the years reached $1,966 billion in 2024, from $710 billion in 2002. Counting data this way, the paper finds, the economy grew a little faster from 2002 to 2024, by an average of seven basis points a year.
The change comes from a new global rulebook. In March 2025 the United Nations Statistical Commission recommended the 2025 System of National Accounts, which brings data into the national accounts as a new kind of produced asset. Countries are now working out how to measure it, and the US paper is one of the most detailed attempts so far.
How it is measured matters. The agency values a company's own data by what it cost to produce: the staff time, systems and storage that go into collecting and organising it. That is the method the 2025 standard recommends for data made for a company's own use. It says nothing about what anyone else would pay for the same records. Cost is what it took to build the data, not what it would fetch.
This is the gap owners should notice. National statisticians now count data as capital, but company accounts mostly still do not. Under the international accounting standard for intangible assets, customer lists and similar items a company builds itself are not recognised on the balance sheet. The same records can be part of an investment worth hundreds of billions in the national accounts and worth nothing in the company's own books.
None of this tells a single owner what their data is worth. A cost-based estimate across a whole economy is a different thing from a price agreed between two parties for a defined set of records, and the agency calls its figures experimental. But it does settle one argument. Data is not exhaust, or a by-product to be thrown in with the furniture when a business is sold. The people who measure economies now treat it as something built with real money, used for years and worth recording.
For an owner, the practical step follows from the gap. Know what you hold, how long it took to build and roughly what it cost, before anyone makes an offer. The cost is the starting point. What a market will pay to lease or license it is the number worth finding out, and it is set by the people who want to use it.
