🇳🇿 New Zealand vs 🇺🇸 United States

Analysis

By total government debt, New Zealand ranks 52nd-largest and United States ranks 1st-largest among the 137 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 national debt in United States is roughly 4.0× that in New Zealand ($119,438 vs $30,005 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: United States sits at 124% of GDP, well above New Zealand's 55%, meaning United States 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: United States's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($60K/sec vs $517/sec for New Zealand), adding roughly $5,156,611,200 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: United States's population (336M) is about 65.9× New Zealand's (5M), 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.