🇬🇧 United Kingdom vs 🇨🇳 China

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. China currently owes about 5.1× as much as the United Kingdom — a gap of $17.58 trillion. Updated every second from each country's baseline figure; sources below.

Among the 135 governments tracked here, the United Kingdom ranks 17th by debt-to-GDP and China 20th. Measured per person, the United Kingdom is 7th and China 41st.

Analysis

By total government debt, the United Kingdom ranks 4th and China 2nd among the 135 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 Kingdom is roughly 3.9× that in China ($61,601 vs $15,610 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: the United Kingdom sits at 102% of GDP, above China's 99%, meaning the United Kingdom 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: China's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($99K/sec vs $8K/sec for the United Kingdom), adding roughly $7,875,446,400 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: China's population (1.40B) is about 20.1× the United Kingdom's (70M), 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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