World Clock / Canada / vs United Kingdom

🇨🇦 Canada vs 🇬🇧 United Kingdom

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. United Kingdom currently owes about 1.6× more — a gap of $1.58 trillion. Updated every second from IMF baselines.

🇨🇦
Canada
$2,730,948,363,572
Debt-to-GDP114%
Per citizen$68,103
Per second+$4,538
VS
🇬🇧
United Kingdom
$4,314,818,290,442
Debt-to-GDP102%
Per citizen$63,640
Per second+$10,175
In nominal terms, United Kingdom carries the larger government debt — roughly 1.6× that of Canada, a difference of $1.58 trillion. Note that debt-to-GDP (Canada: 114%, United Kingdom: 102%) is the better measure of sustainability than the raw total.

Analysis

By total government debt, Canada ranks 9th-largest and United Kingdom ranks 4th-largest among the 137 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 national debt in Canada is roughly 1.1× that in United Kingdom ($68,103 vs $63,640 per person).

Both countries carry debt-to-GDP ratios above the 100% mark that analysts often treat as an informal threshold for closer scrutiny — Canada at 114% and United Kingdom at 102% — meaning each owes more than a full year's worth of national output.

The gap between them is widening: United Kingdom's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($10K/sec vs $5K/sec for Canada), adding roughly $487,036,800 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: United Kingdom's population (68M) is about 1.7× Canada's (40M), 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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Source: Global Debt Clock, based on the IMF World Economic Outlook (April 2026, general government gross debt) and World Bank IDS.
Live data: /api/compare?a=ca&b=gb · Canada page · United Kingdom page
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