🇳🇷 Nauru vs 🇯🇵 Japan

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. Japan currently owes about 1181237.0× as much as Nauru — a gap of $8.72 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, Nauru ranks 185th by debt-to-GDP and Japan 1st. Measured per person, Nauru is 169th and Japan 3rd.

Analysis

By total government debt, Nauru ranks 193rd 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 117.5× that in Nauru ($71,124 vs $605 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Japan sits at 205% of GDP, well above Nauru'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 Nauru. Japan spends about 0.5% of government revenue on net interest ($8.8 billion in 2025); there is no usable net interest figure for Nauru. See the full interest ranking.

The gap between them is narrowing: Nauru's debt is growing faster in dollar terms (−$0.52/sec vs −$15K/sec for Japan), closing the difference by roughly $1,265,542,272 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 19 years.

Scale is part of the story too: Japan's population (123M) is about 10050.5× Nauru's (0M), 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.

Nauru 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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