We derive the degrees of freedom of the lasso fit, placing no assumptions on the predictor matrix $X$. Like the well-known result of Zou, Hastie and Tibshirani [Ann. Statist. 35 (2007) 2173–2192], which gives the degrees of freedom of the lasso fit when $X$ has full column rank, we express our result in terms of the active set of a lasso solution. We extend this result to cover the degrees of freedom of the generalized lasso fit for an arbitrary predictor matrix $X$ (and an arbitrary penalty matrix $D$). Though our focus is degrees of freedom, we establish some intermediate results on the lasso and generalized lasso that may be interesting on their own.