🇧🇹 Bhutan vs 🇺🇸 United States

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. The United States currently owes about 9223.6× as much as Bhutan — 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, Bhutan ranks 20th by debt-to-GDP and the United States 13th. Measured per person, Bhutan is 89th and the United States 2nd.

Analysis

By total government debt, Bhutan ranks 151st 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 21.3× that in Bhutan ($118,608 vs $5,564 per person).

Both countries carry debt above 100% of GDP — Bhutan at 103% and the United States at 124% — meaning each owes more than a full year's worth of national output. What that means for each depends on who holds the debt, in what currency and at what interest rate.

The IMF puts the United States at 97% of GDP net of financial assets, and publishes no net debt figure for Bhutan. Bhutan spends about 6.8% of government revenue on net interest ($66 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 $30/sec for Bhutan), adding roughly $6,888,067,200 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: the United States' population (343M) is about 432.7× Bhutan's (1M), 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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