🇰🇷 South Korea vs 🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. South Korea currently owes about 2.3× as much as Saudi Arabia — a gap of $585.1 billion. Updated every second from each country's baseline figure; sources below.

Among the 135 governments tracked here, South Korea ranks 76th by debt-to-GDP and Saudi Arabia 115th. Measured per person, South Korea is 34th and Saudi Arabia 47th.

Analysis

By total government debt, South Korea ranks 15th and Saudi Arabia 24th 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 South Korea is roughly 1.6× that in Saudi Arabia ($20,294 vs $12,589 per person).

Both sit below 60% of GDP, the EU's Maastricht reference value — South Korea at 52% and Saudi Arabia at 32%. A low ratio is not on its own a sign of strength: some governments borrow little because lenders will not lend to them.

The gap between them is widening: South Korea's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($2K/sec vs $2K/sec for Saudi Arabia), adding roughly $12,960,000 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: South Korea's population (52M) is about 1.4× Saudi Arabia's (37M), 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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