🇬🇧 United Kingdom vs 🇯🇵 Japan

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. Japan currently owes about 2.0× as much as the United Kingdom — a gap of $4.44 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 Japan 1st. Measured per person, the United Kingdom is 7th and Japan 3rd.

Analysis

By total government debt, the United Kingdom ranks 4th and Japan 3rd 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 Japan is roughly 1.2× that in the United Kingdom ($71,305 vs $61,601 per person).

Both countries carry debt above 100% of GDP — the United Kingdom at 102% and Japan at 205% — 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 gap between them is narrowing: the United Kingdom's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($8K/sec vs −$15K/sec for Japan), closing the difference by roughly $1,972,080,000 per day. At that pace — and holding both growth rates constant, a simplification, since real-world rates shift with fiscal policy — the two would reach a similar total in roughly 6 years.

Scale is part of the story too: Japan's population (123M) is about 1.8× 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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