Data Revisions & Changelog
Figures on this site change when the underlying sources change. This page records those revisions with dates, so a number quoted last week can be traced to the vintage it came from. For how the figures are built in the first place, see the methodology page.
17 October 2026 — growth ranking and daily-change tiles
- Fastest-growing ranking: the five countries with no growth estimate (Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Senegal, Ecuador) were ranked 119th–123rd, between Belize (+$0.09 a second) and Zimbabwe (−$0.93), as if their growth were zero. They are now listed below the table as not ranked.
- Country pages: the daily-change tile read “Added today”, “Repaid today” or “FX change today” above an unsigned figure, so Japan’s $1.3 billion daily fall looked like an increase, and “repaid” claimed more than the projection shows. It now reads “Added per day”, “Fall per day” or “Per day (exchange rate)”, with a minus sign for falls.
17 October 2026 — map page text
- “Every country is counting upward”: the map said so while twelve counters fall in US dollars and five are held flat. It now gives the three numbers, computed from the data.
- Unshaded countries: the map said these are countries the IMF publishes no comparable figures for. Most do have IMF figures — Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Namibia and others among 59 smaller economies counted in the world total but not tracked separately. The legend now says so; only a few, such as Venezuela and Cuba, have no reliable figure.
17 October 2026 — homepage headline rate, review date and a double count
- Headline rate: the homepage’s headline counter, its next-milestone box, the “since you opened this page” panel and the press page displayed “+$274,561/sec”, the world rate before 16 October; the counters themselves ran at the correct rate. They now show $274,244 and are written from the data.
- Review date: the headline said the data was “reviewed Jun 2026”; it was re-based in October.
- “Borrowing fastest” panel: it listed the EU alongside Germany and added both into a “combined” figure, counting Germany’s borrowing twice. The EU, which is the sum of its members, is no longer listed there.
- Smaller fixes: the quick comparison said one country “owes ~1.8× more” (now “about 1.8× as much”); falling counters showed “$-499,380 added” (now “fallen”, with the amount).
17 October 2026 — homepage verdict labels removed
- Country cards: each card carried a badge reading Stable, Watch, Warning or Critical, set purely by debt-to-GDP at 60%, 90% and 120% — lines our own 90% explainer shows are not rules. It labelled Singapore, a net creditor, “Critical”. The badges now state the range (for example “Over 120% of GDP”); the colours are unchanged.
- Highest and lowest panels: “Crisis Watch” said ratios above 120% exceeded an “IMF warning threshold”. The IMF sets no such line. “Bright Spots” called ratios below 30% “well inside sustainable territory”, and actually listed countries below 35%. The panels are now “Highest Ratios” and “Lowest Ratios”, with notes that say what each selects.
17 October 2026 — stale world growth rate on four pages
- World growth rate: the FAQ (in four places, including the answers search engines read), the homepage’s key-facts list and the “page not found” page still quoted earlier world rates — $274,561, $274,410 and, on the not-found page, August’s $279,686 a second. All now give the current $274,244, and the not-found page is written from the data. The FAQ’s world total now says more than $118 trillion, passed in early October.
- Sources: links to the BIS Triennial Survey and Global Liquidity Indicators, the US Treasury, and two privacy pages pointed at addresses that now redirect; they go straight to the current pages.
17 October 2026 — country names in comparisons; sitemap dates
- Comparison and country text: the generated sentences on comparison pages, the country-page explanations, the debt chart captions and the lifetime calculator printed “United States’s ratio”, “Netherlands’s debt” and “as much as United Kingdom”. They now read “the United States’ ratio”, “the Netherlands’ debt” and “the United Kingdom”.
- “9.4× more”: comparison page descriptions said one government “owes about 9.4× more” than another, which strictly means 10.4 times as much, and printed “1.0× more” for near-equal pairs. They now say “9.4× as much”, or that the two owe about the same.
- Sitemap: 521 of 567 pages told search engines they were last changed on 20 June, though the October data update changed every figure on them. The dates are now set from each page’s last real change.
17 October 2026 — history API now serves recorded figures only
/api/debt/history: for every country outside the nine largest economies it returned a “history” made by running today’s growth rate backwards, labelled only as rough estimates. Those numbers were never recorded by anyone; Senegal’s came out flat at $47.4 billion for 2015–2025, where the IMF has $7.9 billion for 2015. It now returns the IMF’s recorded year-end figures (the same October 2026 series the lifetime calculator uses), or an empty history with the reason for Somalia, Yemen and Syria, whose current figures come from other sources.- Embeddable widget: Cloudflare was adding its analytics script to the widget, which the widget’s own security policy then blocked, so every site embedding a counter saw an error in its browser console. The widget is now marked so Cloudflare leaves it alone; it carries no analytics, as the embed page says.
- Smaller fixes:
/.well-known/llms.txtreturned a one-line text file holding a URL; it now redirects to/llms.txt. The EU’s API summary and the milestone feed no longer call government debt “national debt”. Ten search boxes and menus on the homepage, embed and press pages gained labels for screen readers.
17 October 2026 — Senegal moved to the October IMF figures
- Senegal: the IMF’s October 2026 World Economic Outlook gives Senegal’s end-2025 debt (CFA franc 27.51 trillion, about $47.4 billion, 128% of GDP) but no projection for 2026, so Senegal had been left on the April figures ($48.3 billion, 130%, growing $166 a second). It now uses the October figure and its counter holds still until the next edition, as Ecuador’s and Lebanon’s already do. 131 of the 135 countries are now on the October edition.
- World total: $111.454 trillion at end-2025, growing $274,410 a second, becomes $111.453 trillion growing $274,244 a second. Every crossing stays on the same day: $119 trillion on 15 November moves from about 06:45 to 12:20 UTC. On the model, $117 trillion now falls at about 02:30 UTC on 23 August rather than late on 22 August; the articles that date it say so.
- Debt history: Senegal now appears in the lifetime calculator, from 2000. The IMF’s own series for 1996–1999 is not usable: 1996 is a thousandth of 1997 (a unit slip), and 1998–99 read 15–19% of GDP between 68% and 58%.
17 October 2026 — country-page wording corrected
- Daily and yearly figures: country pages and
/api/summaryprinted daily borrowing in billions to one decimal place, so the Philippines ($498 a second, about $43 million a day) read “$0 billion per day”, smaller countries read “$0.0 billion”, and yearly figures rounded to whole billions (Suriname’s ~$0.5 billion a year showed as $1 billion). Amounts under a billion are now given in millions or thousands. - “Citizens”: sentences such as “each of Norway’s 6 million citizens” divided by total population, which includes residents who are not citizens. They now say residents.
- European Union: its page called the sum of the 27 member governments’ debt the EU’s “national debt” and promised a world rank it does not have. It is now “government debt”, and the note says that debt the EU raises in its own name (such as NextGenerationEU bonds) is not included, except the part lent on to member governments.
- Grammar: country questions and headings read “What is United Kingdom’s national debt” and “Netherlands’s government owes”; they now take “the” and the correct possessive.
17 October 2026 — two milestone articles; $40 trillion article corrected
- New: China’s government debt is about to cross $22 trillion (around 5 November on the IMF’s narrow measure) and when the US national debt hits $41 trillion (around 20 February 2027, just below the $41.1 trillion debt limit). Both are built from the dataset and will be updated when each line is crossed; the US article will carry the Treasury’s recorded date.
- $40 trillion article: its per-person figures still divided by the US population used before the October re-base (336.05 million); with the current 342.84 million, $40 trillion is about $117,000 per resident, not $119,000. Its social-media description still gave the model’s August 17 date; it now gives the Treasury’s recorded August 18.
- llms.txt (the summary AI assistants read): its key facts said 137 countries (135), a world growth rate of $274,561 per second ($274,410) and $13,790 per person ($13,760). They are now generated from the data and checked before each release, and the file lists upcoming milestones with their modeled dates.
17 October 2026 — news-driven counter surge removed
- Counters: when a country’s news panel loaded headlines containing phrases such as “debt ceiling”, “bailout” or “rate hike”, the homepage raised that country’s borrowing rate by 15% for 30 minutes, on its card, its detail panel and the benchmark total. That surge came from news wording, not from any data, and it has been removed. Counters now always run at the rate in the data, and a release check stops the multiplier coming back. It could affect what visitors saw until 7 October, when country clicks started going to each country’s own page, where this code never ran. How often it fired before then cannot be reconstructed; by 17 October the headlines service was also rejecting the site’s requests.
- Headlines removed: the “Latest News” panel and the
/newsendpoint behind it are gone. The panel sat on the old in-page country view, which no visitor has reached since 7 October, and the endpoint had returned no headlines since the Guardian API began rejecting its key. The Guardian API is no longer listed as a service on the privacy page, and/newsis no longer in the API description.
17 October 2026 — lifetime calculator rebuilt on recorded history
- “Your Lifetime Debt Tab” and the birth-year box on the homepage multiplied today’s borrowing rate by your age and called it debt added in your lifetime. For someone born in 1980 that said the world’s governments had added $398 trillion, more than three times all government debt that exists, and the US $87 trillion (the recorded figure is about $39.5 trillion). Both now compare recorded year-end debt from the year before you were born with today’s live figure: IMF World Economic Outlook stocks (October 2026), and the Treasury’s Historical Debt Outstanding for the US. Where a country’s series starts later than your birth year, the result says so. The data is published at /data/debt-history.json.
- Impact calculator: its unit costs were unsourced round numbers, including “$25B per Apollo-class moon mission” (the whole Apollo program’s 1960s cost). It now uses four sourced figures (NEA teacher pay, NASA Inspector General Artemis launch cost, UNICEF child vaccination cost, IRENA solar cost), listed under the tool. Schools and hospitals were dropped: no national figure could be sourced.
- Homepage counters: “since you arrived”, the share text and the debt receipt used a world growth rate of $119,000 per second, less than half the current $274,410, and an out-of-date US population. They now read both from the data.
- “What it could pay for” lines: the rotating comparisons under the “since you arrived” counter used unsourced figures, and the nurse line divided by $50,000 while its label said $80,000. They now use the NEA teacher average ($74,495), the Census median gross rent ($1,487), College Board public in-state tuition ($11,950) and the BLS median nurse wage ($97,550). The shareable debt receipt printed fixed totals of “$36.2+ trillion” for the US and “$117+ trillion” for the world; it now prints the live figures. The header’s fallback text (“$102T+”) and the counters’ screen-reader labels (“approximately 117 trillion”) are now filled in with the live total.
17 October 2026 — API and AI-agent endpoint fixed
- Embeddable counter: the widget offered to other websites showed “Data unavailable” for every country. A security setting on the widget blocked it from loading the site’s own data file, and had done so since at least 9 July 2026. It now loads, and a release check stops the setting coming back. If you embedded the counter, it will start working without any change on your side. A counter embedded for Venezuela or Cuba, which have no sourced figure since 16 October, now says so instead of quietly showing the United States.
- RSS feed: the milestones feed described itself as carrying “threshold alerts for 135 countries”; it carries a daily world total and trillion-dollar milestones for the largest economies, and now says so. Its items no longer change their publication time on every fetch.
- Rankings API:
/api/rankrejected its own default and every two-word field (gdpPct,perCapita), so a plain request always returned an error. It also ranked the world total and the EU alongside countries, with “World” first by debt. Both fixed; search no longer lists the aggregates unless asked for them, and region searches such as “highest debt africa” no longer return only South Africa. - Threshold alerts:
/api/watchanswered “registration accepted” to webhook sign-ups it never stored, so no alert could ever arrive. It now says webhooks are not offered and returns the projected date the counter reaches the threshold. - AI agents:
/mcpwas described as a Model Context Protocol server but did not speak the protocol, so MCP clients could not connect. It now does (JSON-RPC 2.0 over HTTP), with the older request format still accepted. - Homepage metadata: the structured-data figure for world debt per person still read $13,853 from before the October re-base ($13,760 now), and the description quoted an outdated growth rate. The figure is now updated with the rest of the data and checked before each release.
17 October 2026 — snapshot citations made reproducible
- Snapshot API:
/api/debt/snapshotpromised a figure that could be cited and checked later, but it worked each past moment out from the current baselines. Every re-base therefore changed old snapshots: after the October re-base, 136 of the 137 entries still in the dataset returned a different number for 1 September (Libya went from $28 billion to $70.5 billion), and Venezuela and Cuba returned nothing. Each answer now comes from the data version that was live at the requested moment. Nine versions are recorded, from 10 July 2026 onwards. Where today’s data gives a different figure for the same moment, the response shows both. - The “current” snapshot (no timestamp) was cached for a year; it is now cached for 60 seconds. A browser that fetched it before today may still hold an old copy.
- Citations and source lines: every “Copy citation” button credited the IMF World Economic Outlook, including for the US (Treasury data) and for Yemen, Somalia, Syria and Senegal, whose figures come from IMF country reports, the World Bank or the April 2026 Outlook. Citations now name each country’s own source, and compare-page citations link to reproducible snapshots instead of a live figure. Footers on comparison and ranking pages now credit the sources behind the countries shown. Pages no longer call these figures “official” baselines: for most countries the baseline is the IMF’s estimate, not the government’s own figure.
17 October 2026 — generated pages and articles checked
- Statistics: the US $40 trillion crossing now gives the Treasury’s recorded date, August 18, 2026, not the model’s back-cast of August 12.
- G20: the G20 is not “the world’s 20 largest economies”, and since 2023 its members have included the African Union.
- Tables: the G20 table, comparison pages and growth ranking labelled every falling or unestimated counter “stable”; they now show the signed rate or “not estimated”.
- Comparison pages: “owes 1.8× more” now reads “1.8× as much”, near-ties say so, and the analysis no longer says analysts treat 100% of GDP as a threshold or that ratios under 60% mean little pressure.
- Homepage: stale figures (Japan at 207%, the US at “over $39 trillion”, the EU at “over $15 trillion”) and the old description of how growth rates are set were updated.
- Articles: the lowest-debt table was rebuilt from current data (it still showed Somalia at its unsourced former figure); Zambia was Africa’s first pandemic-era default, not the world’s; the UK passed China in the Treasury’s count of all foreign holders of US debt in 2025.
- G20 download: the homepage’s “institutional” export asked for a name, an email and an asset tier, then sent them to an address that did not exist, so every request failed. It is now two plain buttons, CSV and JSON, with nothing to fill in. Nothing typed into the old form was ever stored.
16 October 2026 — country-page text audited
The paragraph at the top of each country page, and the sentences generated around it, had never been checked against sources. Now they have, and they are covered by the same automated claims audit as the articles.
- No more invented IMF thresholds. Every country page, its FAQ, the API summary and the homepage country view said things like “the IMF’s informal 60% benchmark” and “the IMF’s 90% threshold”. The IMF sets no such lines: 60% is the EU’s Maastricht reference value, and 90% comes from a study later shown to rest partly on a spreadsheet error. The pages now say where a country’s ratio sits among the governments tracked here instead. The same fixed sentences had told Singapore, a net creditor, that debt service was crowding out its public services, and called Somalia and Haiti “fiscally conservative”.
- The world average per person quoted on every country page was a hard-coded, out-of-date figure; it is now computed.
- Falling counters no longer claim “a budget surplus or an active debt-reduction programme” when the projection behind them does not say why the dollar figure falls.
- Out of date: Bulgaria (adopted the euro on 1 January 2026), Kuwait (public-debt law passed March 2025), Colombia (fiscal rule suspended June 2025), Sweden (surplus target becomes a balanced-budget target from 2027), Finland (Fitch downgrade to AA, 2025), Panama (Fitch cut it below investment grade, March 2024).
- Wrong as stated: Zambia was Africa’s first pandemic-era default, not the world’s; Nigeria is one of Africa’s largest economies, not the largest; Thailand is one of Southeast Asia’s largest, not the second-largest; Barbados did not pioneer hurricane-clause bonds; Sudan’s inflation is very high, not hyperinflation; Algeria’s, Nepal’s and Madagascar’s debt is moderate, not low.
- FAQ: removed a reference to Venezuela’s former unsourced ratio, and the same IMF-threshold claim.
16 October 2026 — four figures sourced; Venezuela and Cuba removed
Six countries had carried round, hand-typed figures with no recorded source since this site began. We checked each against the IMF, the World Bank and official sources. Four now have sourced figures. Two have no official, IMF or World Bank figure at all, so they no longer have one here: Venezuela and Cuba are left out of the rankings, the world total and every aggregate, and their pages explain why. The site now tracks 135 countries.
| Country | Was | Now | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ecuador | $67.0 billion, 49% of GDP, growing $152/s | $71.0 billion, 55%, no growth estimate | IMF World Economic Outlook, October 2026 (end-2025 stock; no 2026 projection) |
| Somalia | $5.00 billion, 9% | $1.16 billion, 9%, growing $1.76/s | IMF Country Report 25/335 (December 2025). The old figure was Somalia’s debt before its 2023 relief. |
| Yemen | $35.0 billion, 73% | $9.61 billion, 135% of the GDP of government-controlled areas | IMF Country Report 26/80 (April 2026); about 62% of whole-country GDP |
| Syria | $22.0 billion, 98% | $27.0 billion, 128% | World Bank, Syria Macro-Fiscal Assessment (June 2025), citing the Central Bank of Syria |
| Venezuela | $160.0 billion, 240% | No figure | None exists: the IMF dropped the series in October and the government has published no total |
| Cuba | $18.0 billion, 120% | No figure | None exists: Cuba is not an IMF or World Bank member |
Knock-on dates. The world total now starts at $111.45 trillion rather than $111.65 trillion, so every world crossing moves about eight to nine days later: $117 trillion August 14 to August 22, 2026; $118 trillion September 25 to October 4, 2026; $119 trillion November 6 to November 15, 2026; $120 trillion December 18 to December 27, 2026. On the corrected figures, US federal debt passed $40 trillion (on the Treasury’s own count) four days before the world passed $117 trillion, and the world passed $118 trillion just after our October 1 checkpoint. The $118 trillion piece, the monthly checkpoints, the $40 trillion piece and the $119 trillion piece were recomputed and say so. The piece on governments whose debt cannot be counted defended these round figures; it now opens with a correction.
16 October 2026 — source credits, country count and review cadence corrected
Source credits. Footers, the FAQ, the About and Methodology pages, the API responses and the machine-readable descriptions (llms.txt, the OpenAPI spec) credited IMF Government Finance Statistics, World Bank International Debt Statistics, Eurostat, OECD and “national treasuries for major economies”. None of those supplies a figure on this site. The counters come from the IMF World Economic Outlook (129 of 137 countries), the US Treasury's Debt to the Penny and the CBO (the US only), and earlier estimates for six countries the IMF does not cover; World Bank data is used only for population. Every credit now says so, the API returns each country's own source, and the methodology page also corrects how growth rates are set (the IMF's projected 2026 increase, not “historical borrowing patterns”) and China's augmented debt (about 127% of GDP, not 124%).
Country count and review cadence. The site said it tracks 138 countries; it tracks 137. The extra one was the European Union, an aggregate of 27 of them, counted as a country. It also said figures are reviewed quarterly. In practice they are re-based twice a year, on each new IMF World Economic Outlook (April and October), with corrections in between when needed; both statements now say so.
Share images. The preview cards shown when a page is shared on social media had been rendered a few hours before the population and Lebanon updates of 16 October, so Lebanon's card still showed its superseded figures and every card's per-person figure used the old populations. They also labelled every non-rising counter “stable” (including Japan's falling dollar figure and the six countries with no growth estimate), credited the IMF October edition to countries not on it, and called a static image “live”. All 696 cards and the three posters were rebuilt with dated figures and per-country sources.
World debt per person. The $118 trillion article divided the world total by the population of the 137 countries tracked here rather than the world's, overstating debt per person by about 4% ($15,181 instead of about $14,600). Corrected.
Date shifts. The October re-base moved the world's crossing dates by about two days at most, and by less the further out the line: about 17 hours for $119 trillion. An earlier description said “a day or two” for most of them; it has been corrected.
16 October 2026 — population re-sourced; Lebanon re-based
Population. Per-person figures now divide by the IMF's own population estimate for 2026, from the same October 2026 World Economic Outlook as the debt figures. The previous populations were typed in by hand and often years out of date: 34 countries were more than 10% off. Every figure was cross-checked against the World Bank's latest population series. Where the two disagree because the IMF counts only the population a government actually serves — Ukraine's government-controlled areas, the Republic of Cyprus — the IMF figure is kept, because that is the right denominator for that government's debt. Where the IMF figure departs from the World Bank's by more than 20% with no such reason (Yemen, Guyana), or is missing (Cuba, Syria), the World Bank figure is used.
| Country | Previous | Now |
|---|---|---|
| Ukraine | 43.5M | 32.4M |
| Cyprus | 1.30M | 1.00M |
| Ivory Coast | 27.5M | 33.8M |
| Kuwait | 4.20M | 5.08M |
| Niger | 25.0M | 30.2M |
| Yemen | 33.7M | 40.6M |
| UAE | 9.70M | 11.6M |
| Mali | 22.0M | 26.0M |
| Qatar | 2.70M | 3.19M |
| Oman | 4.60M | 5.41M |
| Angola | 34.5M | 40.6M |
| Albania | 2.80M | 2.35M |
22 further countries moved by more than 10%; all are in the dataset. The US population is now 342.84 million, up from a rounded 336.05 million, so US debt per person is about $118,000 rather than $120,000. The EU population is now the sum of its members, like its debt.
Lebanon. Held back on 15 October for a separate review, Lebanon now follows the IMF too: about $48.1 billion at the end of 2025, 139% of GDP. The previous $100.0 billion was the pre-crisis dollar value of the debt and did not match the site's own ratio for Lebanon: on 2024 GDP it implied about half that sum. The difference is the pound's devaluation, from 1,507 to 89,500 per dollar, which cut the dollar value of debt owed in pounds. The IMF publishes no projection for Lebanon, so its counter still does not move.
Knock-on dates. Lebanon is part of the world total, which now starts at $111.65 trillion rather than $111.70 trillion, so each world crossing date moves a day or two later than in yesterday's entry: $117 trillion August 12 to August 14; $118 trillion September 23 to September 25; $119 trillion November 4 to November 6; $120 trillion December 16 to December 18. The milestone and reconciliation articles were recomputed again.
15 October 2026 — baselines re-based to the IMF World Economic Outlook (October 2026)
The IMF published its October 2026 World Economic Outlook on 13 October. Baselines for 128 of 137 sovereigns now come from it. The method is unchanged: the end-2025 stock, anchored to 1 January 2026 and growing at the projected 2026 accumulation. An October edition revises that same anchor rather than moving it; the anchor moves to end-2026 with the April 2027 edition.
Most figures barely moved — the median change in starting debt among the 101 routine countries was 0.3%. These moved by more than 10%:
| Country | Previous | Revised | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Libya | $28.0B | $68.8B | +146% |
| Zambia | $17.0B | $28.9B | +70% |
| Iran | $88.0B | $132.0B | +50% |
| Papua New Guinea | $12.0B | $17.1B | +42% |
| Sri Lanka | $80.0B | $105.4B | +32% |
| Norway | $238.8B | $286.3B | +20% |
| Ethiopia | $47.0B | $54.7B | +16% |
| European Union | $15.88T | $17.59T | +11% |
| Bulgaria | $35.5B | $39.1B | +10% |
Back on IMF data
Sri Lanka, Libya, Zambia, Pakistan, the UAE, Belize, Argentina, Iran, Laos and Papua New Guinea were previously sourced elsewhere because the IMF figure was missing, incomplete or pointed the wrong way in April. In October each has a usable stock and projection, so all ten now follow the WEO like everyone else. Argentina, Iran, Laos and Papua New Guinea also gain local-currency figures: their dollar totals fall only because their currencies are projected to weaken, while debt in their own currencies rises, and without the local figures their pages would have described that as repayment.
Not re-based
- United States. Kept on the Treasury's total public debt basis. Re-anchored to Debt to the Penny at the close of 14 October 2026 ($40.33T); the growth rate stays at $60,200 per second, because the Treasury's own figures since April had tracked it to within 0.06%. The Treasury's series shows the first close above $40 trillion on 18 August 2026.
- Lebanon. Held for a separate review. The October WEO puts Lebanon's debt roughly half of the current figure, with no actual data since 2021 and a contested exchange rate.
- Ecuador and Senegal. The October WEO gives a 2025 stock but no 2026 projection, so there is no rate to derive; both keep their current figures rather than pair a new stock with a rate from another source.
- Venezuela, Cuba, Somalia, Yemen and Syria. Still no WEO figure. These, with Lebanon, are now the 6 counters that do not move; Zambia and Libya, previously among them, now have IMF projections.
Taiwan and the European Union
The April edition contained a one-year jump of about 31% in Taiwan's series, caused by a definition change, and Taiwan's rate was taken from 2026–27 to step around it. The October edition no longer contains the jump, so Taiwan now uses the standard method.
The European Union figure did not equal the sum of its own 27 members: it showed $15.88T growing at 17,000 per second, while its members summed to more and grew far faster. It is now derived from them — $17.59T at 1 January 2026, growing at 46,473 per second — and can no longer drift.
The world total
- Level. $111.50T to $111.70T at 1 January 2026 — the 137 tracked sovereigns plus 59 further WEO reporters (58 in April).
- Rate. $279,686 to $274,561 per second.
- Displayed figure. A higher start and a slower climb nearly cancel: today's world counter is 0.07% different from what the April figures would show.
- Crossing dates. Each moves a few days earlier: $118 trillion from September 27 to September 23, 2026; $119 trillion from November 7 to November 4, 2026; $120 trillion from December 18 to December 16, 2026.
Articles that quoted model figures were recomputed and carry a dated update note: the $118 trillion piece (with a full reconciliation), the US $40 trillion piece, and the July, September and October checkpoints. The eight governments whose debt cannot be counted is kept as published, with a note that two have left the list. Share images and the map posters were regenerated.
History charts
The 2015–2024 debt-to-GDP charts on the nine country pages that have them, and /api/debt/history, still used an older IMF edition after the re-base, so their last point and today's figure were measured against different GDP figures. Japan's chart showed 253% in 2024 followed by 205% now, a fall that came from the change of edition, not from falling debt. The history now comes from the October 2026 edition too: on it Japan stands at 214% in 2024 and 205% in 2025. The world history in the API is the sum of the IMF reporters' debt over the sum of their GDP, the same way the current world figure is built, because the IMF publishes no world ratio.
As with earlier revisions: if you cited a previous figure, it is not retracted — it was the best estimate on the vintage then published — but the current figure is better sourced.
24 August 2026 — world aggregate reconciled to its own components
The world total is now derived, and constrained, so that it cannot fall behind the countries it is made of. This corrects a flaw in the 19 August revision below.
That revision fixed the world level but not the world rate. The world figure grew at $227,778 per second while the 137 tracked sovereigns grew at a combined $278,148 per second — about 18% faster. A whole that grows more slowly than the sum of its parts is overtaken eventually, and it was: the crossover happened around 20 August 2026, four days before this entry. For roughly five days the site showed a world total marginally smaller than the countries listed beneath it, by about $0.02 trillion.
The aggregate is now rebuilt from its components rather than carried as a standalone number:
- Level. $111.497 trillion at 1 January 2026 — the 137 tracked sovereigns ($111.204T) plus the 58 further WEO reporters not tracked individually ($0.293T).
- Rate. $279,686 per second — the sum of all 195 component rates, so the margin over the tracked set can only widen.
- Debt-to-GDP. 95% to 94%, recomputed against summed WEO nominal GDP on the same 195-reporter footprint. This figure is now stated as derived from this dataset rather than attributed to the IMF Fiscal Monitor, which measures a different country set.
The baseline fell by about $0.7 trillion, because the previous non-tracked remainder ($1.01T) was larger than re-derivation from the WEO supports ($0.29T). The displayed figure rose, because the corrected growth rate more than offsets the lower starting point — roughly $117.2 trillion at the time of this change, against $116.9 trillion for the summed countries.
The consistency checker that runs before every deploy now treats both conditions as hard failures: the world total may never be smaller than the sum of its tracked members, and the world rate may never be slower than their combined rate. The first condition was previously a warning that was allowed to fail; that is how this went unnoticed. It can no longer ship.
19 August 2026 — baselines re-based to the IMF World Economic Outlook (April 2026)
The largest revision this site has made. Baselines for 119 of 137 sovereigns were re-derived from the IMF World Economic Outlook (April 2026), general government gross debt.
Two things changed at once:
- Precision. Many smaller economies previously carried figures rounded to one or two significant digits — Algeria was stored as exactly $40,000,000,000. Those roundings were often materially wrong, and in some cases contradicted the debt-to-GDP ratio shown on the same page.
- Anchoring. The WEO reports debt as a stock at end-of-period. Baselines are now the end-2025 stock, anchored to 1 January 2026 and growing at the projected 2026 accumulation, so a figure shown today is a genuine within-year interpolation rather than a year-end number displayed early.
88 countries moved by more than 10%. The 14 that moved by more than a factor of two:
| Country | Previous | Revised | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Algeria | $40.0B | $154.6B | 3.87× |
| Trinidad & Tobago | $6.0B | $21.8B | 3.63× |
| Senegal | $15.0B | $48.3B | 3.22× |
| Slovenia | $18.0B | $52.5B | 2.91× |
| Burkina Faso | $5.0B | $14.1B | 2.82× |
| Ivory Coast | $20.0B | $55.7B | 2.78× |
| Kenya | $35.0B | $94.6B | 2.70× |
| Bolivia | $22.0B | $54.5B | 2.48× |
| Suriname | $2.0B | $4.9B | 2.47× |
| Uganda | $15.0B | $35.8B | 2.39× |
| Dominican Republic | $32.0B | $75.5B | 2.36× |
| Chad | $3.0B | $6.7B | 2.24× |
| Singapore | $480.0B | $1,058.1B | 2.20× |
| Bangladesh | $90.0B | $192.5B | 2.14× |
These revisions make the figures more accurate, not less. If you cited a previous figure, it is not retracted — it was the best estimate on the vintage then published — but the current figure is better sourced.
The world total
The world figure moved from approximately $100 trillion to $112.2 trillion (end-2025 basis). The previous figure had fallen behind: the sum of the individual countries tracked on this site already exceeded it, which is arithmetically impossible. The world total is now derived as the sum of the 137 tracked sovereigns plus the 59 further countries reporting to the WEO. World debt-to-GDP moved from 94% to 95% — the ratio was always about right; the absolute level was stale.
Countries deliberately not re-based
- United States — remains on the US Treasury “total public debt” basis, with a growth rate from the CBO deficit projection. Both are US-official sources and both are now stated on the page.
- Japan — re-based, but note that its debt rises in yen while its US-dollar figure falls, because the yen is weakening faster than the debt grows. That is an exchange-rate effect, not repayment, and the page says so.
- Taiwan — the WEO series contains a definition change between 2025 and 2026 (local-currency debt jumps about 31% in one year). The baseline uses the published end-2025 stock, but the growth rate is taken from 2026–27 so a definitional step is not displayed as borrowing.
- Sudan — adopted the WEO figure ($74.5B, 188% of GDP), replacing a previously reconciled estimate. Its public finances remain highly uncertain.
- Eighteen countries are not on the April 2026 WEO vintage — the United States by design, and the rest for lack of usable data and retain earlier figures. Every country page now states which basis it is on.
Also changed
- Growth rates. 34 sovereigns previously had a rate of zero, so their counters never moved and their pages read “growing at $0/second”. 26 now carry rates derived from the WEO debt path. The remaining 8 — all conflict or crisis states with no usable projection — state plainly that no estimate is published rather than showing a placeholder.
- Local currency. 116 countries can now be viewed in their own currency. Both series come from the same WEO vintage, so the implied exchange rate is the source’s own rather than one applied by this site.
- Provenance. Every country page, and the API, now state the baseline behind that specific figure.
Earlier
Revisions before August 2026 were made against IMF and national-treasury releases without an itemised public record. This page begins that record; future reviews, including the next scheduled one in October 2026, will be logged here. Last updated 21 August 2026.