🇸🇱 Sierra Leone vs 🇺🇸 United States

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. The United States currently owes about 9613.7× as much as Sierra Leone — a gap of $40.66 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, Sierra Leone ranks 107th by debt-to-GDP and the United States 13th. Measured per person, Sierra Leone is 176th and the United States 2nd.

Analysis

By total government debt, Sierra Leone ranks 152nd and the United States 1st 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 the United States is roughly 252.4× that in Sierra Leone ($118,608 vs $470 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: the United States sits at 124% of GDP, well above Sierra Leone's 51%, meaning the 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 IMF puts the United States at 97% of GDP net of financial assets, and publishes no net debt figure for Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone spends about 36% of government revenue on net interest ($355 million in 2025), and the United States about 10% ($980.6 billion in 2025). Sierra Leone carries the lower debt ratio but the heavier interest bill: rates, currency and assets matter as well as the size of the debt. See the full interest ranking.

The gap between them is widening: the United States' debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($80K/sec vs $10/sec for Sierra Leone), adding roughly $6,889,795,200 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: the United States' population (343M) is about 38.1× Sierra Leone's (9M), 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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