World government debt breakdown

How to read it

The largest government debt piles in the world, converted to US dollars and ranked. The bars are each country's share of the reported total, so the chart answers two questions at once: how big is the aggregate, and how concentrated is it.

How it's calculated

The IMF publishes general government gross debt as a percentage of GDP. Each country's dollar figure is that percentage multiplied by the same source's GDP series for the same year. The total is the sum across every reporting country.

What it did in past cycles

For the most recent reporting year the total across all reporting countries is roughly $96.8 trillion, and it is extraordinarily concentrated. The United States alone accounts for about 36.5% of it at $35.4 trillion; China follows at 17.3% and Japan at 10.2%.

Those three countries together carry roughly two-thirds of all reported government debt on earth. The United Kingdom, France, Italy, India and Germany each sit between 3% and 4%, and no other country reaches 3%.

For scale, the aggregate stood at about $55.2 trillion in 2011 — a rise of roughly 75% in thirteen years, with no year in that stretch showing a material fall.

What it doesn't tell you

Gross debt is not net debt, and it is not adjusted for who holds it — a government that owes a large share of its debt to its own central bank or its own social-security trust funds is in a different position from one that owes it abroad, and this ranking cannot tell them apart.

The dollar conversion adds exchange-rate noise: a country's bar shrinks when its currency weakens, without a cent being repaid. And the figure differs from the US Treasury's own daily total used elsewhere on this site, because the IMF measure excludes intragovernmental holdings. The two must not be spliced.

Reading it with other metrics

World government debt is this same total as a time series, which is where the growth rate is visible.

Bitcoin vs US debt and US debt priced in Bitcoin take the largest bar on this chart and set it against a market price. Hard money is the argument these pages are assembled to support.