This paper examined the risk factors associated with fiscal costs of systemic banking crises using cross-country data. It differentiated between immediate direct fiscal costs of government intervention and overall fiscal costs of banking crises as “proxied” by changes in the public debt-to-GDP ratio. It found that both direct and overall fiscal costs of banking crises were high when countries entered the crisis with large banking sectors that rely on external funding, had leveraged non-financial private sectors, and used guarantees on bank liabilities during the crisis. The better quality of banking supervision and the higher coverage of deposit insurance helped, however, to alleviate the direct fiscal costs. It also identified a possible policy trade-off: costly short-term interventions are not necessarily associated with larger increases in public debt, supporting the thesis that immediate intervention may be actually cost-effective over time.