🇭🇰 Hong Kong vs 🇯🇵 Japan

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. Japan currently owes about 137.1× as much as Hong Kong — a gap of $8.66 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, Hong Kong ranks 184th by debt-to-GDP and Japan 1st. Measured per person, Hong Kong is 72nd and Japan 3rd.

Analysis

By total government debt, Hong Kong ranks 71st and Japan 3rd 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 Japan is roughly 8.4× that in Hong Kong ($71,124 vs $8,435 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Japan sits at 205% of GDP, well above Hong Kong's 12%, meaning Japan owes far more relative to the size of its own economy — even where the nominal, dollar-for-dollar comparison above suggests otherwise.

The IMF puts Japan at 132% of GDP net of financial assets, and publishes no net debt figure for Hong Kong. Hong Kong takes in at least as much interest as it owes, while Japan spends about 0.5% of government revenue on net interest ($8.8 billion in 2025). See the full interest ranking.

The gap between them is narrowing: Hong Kong's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($411/sec vs −$15K/sec for Japan), closing the difference by roughly $1,301,097,600 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 18 years.

Scale is part of the story too: Japan's population (123M) is about 16.3× Hong Kong's (8M), 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.

Hong Kong and Japan are both grouped under this site's “Asia-Pacific” 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.

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