🇦🇫 Afghanistan vs 🇺🇸 United States

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. The United States currently owes about 27040.3× as much as Afghanistan — a gap of $40.66 trillion. Updated every second from each country's baseline figure; sources below.

Net debt and interest: IMF World Economic Outlook, October 2026, general government, 2025, mostly IMF estimates. A dash means no comparable figure. How these are calculated.

Among the 194 governments tracked here, Afghanistan ranks 189th by debt-to-GDP and the United States 13th. Measured per person, Afghanistan is 194th and the United States 2nd.

Analysis

By total government debt, Afghanistan ranks 169th and the United States 1st among the 194 sovereigns tracked on this site.

On a per-citizen basis the picture can look different from the nominal totals: a resident's notional share of the government debt in the United States is roughly 3458.1× that in Afghanistan ($118,608 vs $34 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: the United States sits at 124% of GDP, well above Afghanistan's 8%, meaning the United States owes far more relative to the size of its own economy — even where the nominal, dollar-for-dollar comparison above suggests otherwise.

The IMF puts the United States at 97% of GDP net of financial assets, and publishes no net debt figure for Afghanistan. Afghanistan spends about 0.2% of government revenue on net interest ($9 million in 2025), and the United States about 10% ($980.6 billion in 2025). See the full interest ranking.

The gap between them is widening: the United States' debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($80K/sec vs $0/sec for Afghanistan), adding roughly $6,890,659,200 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: the United States' population (343M) is about 7.8× Afghanistan's (44M), which is part of why the nominal and per-capita comparisons above can point in different directions — a government's debt load scales loosely with the size of both its economy and its population, not either alone.

This analysis is generated automatically from live data as an educational orientation, not financial advice — see the methodology page for definitions and caveats.

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