Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. United States currently owes about 1116.7× more — a gap of $39.87 trillion. Updated every second from IMF baselines.
By total government debt, Costa Rica ranks 73rd-largest and United States ranks 1st-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 United States is roughly 17.3× that in Costa Rica ($118,739 vs $6,872 per person).
The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: United States sits at 124% of GDP, well above Costa Rica's 60%, meaning 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 gap between them is widening: United States's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($60K/sec vs $71/sec for Costa Rica), adding roughly $5,195,145,600 to the difference each day.
Scale is part of the story too: United States's population (336M) is about 64.6× Costa Rica's (5M), 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.
Costa Rica and United States are both grouped under this site's “Americas” region, so this is, in effect, an intra-regional comparison as well.
This analysis is generated automatically from live data as an educational orientation, not financial advice — see the methodology page for definitions and caveats.