The Government issues treasury bills are the most actively traded zero-coupon debt instrument and are issued every two weeks in 91-, 182-, and 364-day maturities. Treasury bills are issued either through competitive English auctions or non-competitive bids. In 3Q11, the auction sizes of 91-, 182- and 364-day maturities are PHP2, PHP3 and PHP4 billion, respectively.

Fixed-rate treasury notes (FXTNs) are standard government issues offered by the Bureau of the Treasury at 2-, 3-, 4-, 5-, 7-, 10-, 20- or 25-year maturities with fixed-rate, semi-annual coupons. Auctions for new issues/series of FXTNs are conducted under the Dutch system. Auctions for re-issued FXTNs are through competitive English auctions. In 2011, the auction size of FXTNs is 9 billion per issue.

There are also benchmark bonds (aka large-issued/jumbo bonds), which are the result of bond exchanges/swaps. These have the same features with FXTNs. Under the bond exchange, existing holders of FXTNs are invited to surrender their current FXTNs in exchange for a new bond with longer tenor.  The new bond is expected to have better liquidity and depth. Benchmark bond sizes range from PHP30 billion to PHP255 billion.

Retail treasury bonds are government securities that are issued to small individual investors in smaller denominations with frequent, fixed-rate coupon payments. These instruments carry a term of more than one year and can be traded in the secondary market. Retail treasury bonds are issued to underwriters instead of primary dealers. Issue sizes range from PHP20 billion to PHP40 billion. In April 2010, the government began selling multicurrency retail treasury bonds to enable Filipinos to invest in foreign-currency denominated government securities at an affordable minimum denomination of USD100 or EUR100.

Commercial paper comprises mostly floating rate debt instruments issued by leading companies. Prior to the enactment of the new Documentary Stamp Tax Act in February 2004, the private sector preferred issues of commercial paper as a substitute for corporate bonds. These earlier forms of commercial paper had maturities of up to seven years.