This paper aims to examine the redistributive effect of domestically held public debt: while access to public debt products as savings instruments for lenders are primarily reserved for the higher end of the income distribution, the burden of debt financing falls on the entire tax base, to the extent that any tax revenues are used to service debt. In the case of domestic public debt, because it tends to be held by domestic lenders, this involves a redistribution of resources. We use a recently compiled cross-country panel dataset on debt composition and …find that the domestic share of public debt is consistently regressive across a variety of specifications. We control for the size of total and external debt servicing, political conflict, and a variety of government spending variables. We refine our hypothesis to test whether the regressive effect of domestic debt depends on GDP per capita and find that the effect is universal, but GDP per capita plays a protective role. Evidence of a regressive effect of domestic debt has serious equity implications for government strategy as a government decides on how to finance its spending.