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The literature has found that sovereigns with a history of default are charged only a small and/or short-lived premium on the interest rate warranted by observable fundamentals. We re-assess this view using a metric of such a “default premium” (DP) that nests previous metrics and applying it to a much broader dataset. We find a sizeable and persistent DP: in 1870–1938, it averaged 250bps upon market re-entry, tapering to around 150bps five years out; in 1970–2014 the respective estimates are about 350 and 200bps. We also find that: (i) the DP accounts for between 30 and 60% of the sovereign spread within five years of market re-entry, and its contribution to the spread remains non-negligible thereafter; (ii) The DP is higher for countries that take longer to settle with creditors and is on average higher for serial defaulters; (iii) our estimates are robust to many controls including realized “haircuts”. These findings …