U.S. budget deficit hits eight-year low

The shortfall was $438.9 billion in fiscal year 2015, 9.2% less than a year earlier, the Treasury Department said Thursday in a report in Washington. The Congressional Budget Office estimated on October 7 that the gap was $435 billion, Bloomberg reports.

Higher tax receipts "can be attributed to a stronger economy," the department said in a statement.

Receipts rose 7.6% and spending increased 5.2% in the 12 months ended September 30. U.S. economic growth, while modest, is still much higher than in most other developed nations, and helped bring the jobless rate to a seven-year-low of 5.1% in September.

Read alsoFederal Reserve puts rate rise on holdReceipts, investments and expenditures so far this month have led Treasury to lower its estimate of available resources, causing Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew to set an earlier deadline for Congress to raise the debt ceiling. Lawmakers need to act no later than November 3, or the U.S. will be left with less than $30 billion to meet all the nation's commitments, Lew said in a letter to House Speaker John Boehner earlier Thursday.

The U.S. is trying to avoid a repeat of October 2013, when a debt-extension agreement was reached just before the Treasury had expected to run out of borrowing authority. This time, the negotiations have been complicated by Boehner's plans to depart.

For the month of September, the government posted a $91.1 billion surplus, narrower than the $105.8 billion surplus a year earlier.