SGOV was long one of the go-to ETFs for T-bills. Now Vanguard launched their own T-bills ETF with VBIL. Which should you choose? I compare them here.
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So one of my most popular blog posts and videos is my simple overview of SGOV. This makes sense, as it has long been one of the most popular ETFs to capture short-dated US Treasury Bills, or T-bills for short, with over $50 billion in assets at this point.
T-bills are considered to be what we call a “cash equivalent,” a safe parking spot for unused cash that would be roughly comparable to the virtual risklessness of a savings account at a bank. In fact, the 3-month US Treasury Bill is quite literally known as the “risk-free rate,” to which other assets’ yields are compared. The yield of T-bills is still looking pretty attractive in 2025 around 4%.
SGOV from iShares launched in 2020, and investors have since flocked to it for their cash management needs due to both the robust history of iShares as a fund provider and the relatively low fee of SGOV at 0.09%.
After weirdly previously having no products for Treasury Bills, Vanguard finally launched 2 new ETFs for them in the form of VGUS for bills maturing in less than 12 months, and VBIL – the one more comparable to SGOV – for bills maturing in 3 months or less. I briefly summarized VGUS and VBIL in a separate post here.
Vanguard investors are particularly happy to now have Vanguard products for Treasury Bills, but all investors are potentially interested in these new offerings because their expense ratio of 0.07% is slightly lower than that of SGOV at 0.09%. I’d also be willing to bet that fee will come down further in the coming years, as is the Vanguard way. VBIL has very quickly amassed an impressive $3 billion in assets in about 6 months since it launched in early 2025.
Other than that, these funds can be considered, for all intents and purposes, nearly identical. Both hold T-bills with maturities of 3 months or less, albeit via different indexes. SGOV seeks to track the ICE 0-3 Month US Treasury Securities Index, while VBIL seeks to track the Bloomberg 0-3M Treasury Bill Index.
Performance-wise, we’d expect these two to behave nearly identically, and indeed they have thus far in VBIL’s short lifespan. When two products offer the same exposure, I think it’s reasonable to simply prefer the one with the lowest fee, which is VBIL. In the interest of full disclosure, extending that logic, there are other comparable funds for T-bills at the same or lower fees like XHLF, for example, which I covered in a list here.
What do you think of VBIL? Are you going to switch to it from SGOV? What’s your T-bills ETF of choice? Let me know in the comments.
Disclosures: None.
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