Money that arrives year after year
Rather than tying everything up until one distant date, spread it so a bond repays each year. Bankers call this a ladder.
Rungs are spread across the horizon — best net yield in each window, one bond per maturity year, tax-free IFBs competing on equal footing. Where the market has no paper in a window, the next-best yield fills in. Equal split in Ksh 50k steps, priced from your price book where you have recorded one and par where nobody has. Educational planning — actual auction allocations vary.
What the issuer plans to sell
A ladder quietly bets that comparable bonds will still be on offer when each rung matures. The borrower has stated its intention: the current debt strategy sources 82% of borrowing domestically, runs the T-bill stock down from 7.3% to 5.3% of debt by 2029, and lengthens average domestic maturity from 6.4 to 7.6 years — more bonds, longer bonds, for the life of most ladders built here.
For the current year, 2026/27, the budget targets Ksh 1,112bn of net domestic borrowing against a deficit of 5.3% of GDP — up from the Ksh 948bn the 2025/26 supplementary settled on (itself raised from Ksh 625bn). Steady new supply of that size has historically favoured buyers at auction. The revenue side matters because it sets how much must be borrowed: KRA collected Ksh 2.84tn in 2025/26, up 10.6% on the year before.
How last year actually closed: a deficit of 6.8% of GDP against a 7.3% target, public debt of Ksh 13.01tn (up 9.2%), and interest of Ksh 1,074bn — 42 shillings of every 100 of ordinary revenue. Interest is paid before anything else, which is why the borrower keeps coming to auction.
Hand-curated from the tabled documents, 2026-09-24. Context for education, not a recommendation.
What was actually on offer
A ladder rolls each rung into whatever the next auction sells, not into what the strategy says. Across 68 months since 2021, this is how often a bond of each remaining term was on offer at all.
- Under 3 years16% of months
11 of 68 months · 14 auctions
- 3 to 7 years35% of months
24 of 68 months · 28 auctions
- 7 to 15 years68% of months
46 of 68 months · 63 auctions
- Over 15 years65% of months
44 of 68 months · 51 auctions
The short end is the thin one. A rung maturing into a month with no short bond on offer does not lose money — it waits, in cash, earning nothing, until something is issued. That waiting is the cost the yield figure never shows.
The wider picture
Can you actually afford to fund this ladder every month?
This page shapes the bonds and shows what they pay. It knows nothing about your salary, your rent or a loan running alongside — and a ladder you cannot feed is a plan on paper. JiPange works backwards from what you earn to what you can commit each month.
Work out the monthly savingJiPange is our sister tool — free, no account, and it sells nothing either.