Debtors Anonymous (D.A.) is a twelve-step program for people who want to stop incurring unsecured debt. Collectively they attend more than 500 weekly meetings in fifteen countries, according to data released in 2011. Those who compulsively incur unsecured debt are said to be engaged in compulsive borrowing and are known as compulsive debtors.

D.A. encourages careful record keeping and monitoring of finances—including purchases, income, and debt payments—to get a clear picture of spending habits. This information is used to develop healthier spending practices, supporting one in keeping a reasonable quality of life while still repaying debt. Similarly, D.A. recommends developing plans for the future to increase income.

D.A.'s program is intended to facilitate a progressive personality change in its members, ultimately transforming their world views and changing their behaviors.

In the mid-1990s, sociologist Terrell A. Hayes conducted in-depth interviews with a convenience and snowball sample of forty-six members of D.A. Hayes found many of the members interviewed only partially accept the ideology of the organization and that parts of D.A.'s program, such as stigmatizing labels used to describe members, may actually hinder acceptance of D.A.'s ideology.

In 1968, members of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) who believed that their financial difficulties were caused by an addictive disease not unlike alcoholism founded an organization named Penny Pinchers, which they later renamed Capital Builders. The founding members believed their financial problems stemmed from an inability to save money, and they practiced making daily deposits to their savings accounts. Later they recognized their problems were not caused by an inability to save but rather an inability to stay solvent.

In early 1971, the group members came to believe that incurring unsecured debt was the threshold of their disease and committed to a rigorous twelve-step approach to prevent incurring further unsecured debt. The original group disbanded and meetings were not consistently held again until 1976, when a group of two or three people began meeting regularly on Wednesdays in the rectory of St. Stephen's Church in New York City. Within a year, a second group formed and Debtors Anonymous continued to grow. The first General Service Conference was held in 1987 in the auditorium at Saint Vincent's Catholic Medical Center in Manhattan. In 2009^[update], there were 512 groups meeting worldwide.

D.A. adapted AA's format, making only five changes to AA's Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions: "D.A." and "Debtors Anonymous" replaces "AA" and "Alcoholics Anonymous", "debt" replaces "alcoholism", "compulsive debtors" replaces "alcoholics", "incurring unsecured debt" replaces "drinking", and "debtor" replaces "alcoholic." In 2002, D.A. published a list of 12 promises similar to the 12 promises appearing on pages 83–84 of Alcoholics Anonymous. D.A.'s original literature also includes the Twelve Tools of Debtors Anonymous, a list of practices to recover from compulsive getting into debt.

Official D.A. literature is either approved by the D.A. General Service Board (GSB) or by vote at a D.A. annual World Service Conference, based on whether it is service literature (related to the functioning of D.A. groups) or recovery literature (all other D.A. literature). Such literature is "Conference-approved."