🇺🇸 United States vs 🇧🇼 Botswana

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. The United States currently owes about 4649.1× as much as Botswana — a gap of $40.65 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, the United States ranks 13th by debt-to-GDP and Botswana 151st. Measured per person, the United States is 2nd and Botswana 112th.

Analysis

By total government debt, the United States ranks 1st and Botswana 141st 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 35.0× that in Botswana ($118,608 vs $3,385 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: the United States sits at 124% of GDP, well above Botswana's 34%, 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.

Net of financial assets: the IMF puts the United States at 97% of GDP and Botswana at 33%, against 124% and 34% gross. The United States spends about 10% of government revenue on net interest ($980.6 billion in 2025), and Botswana about 5.0% ($252 million in 2025). See the full interest ranking.

The gap between them is widening: the United States' debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($80K/sec vs $70/sec for Botswana), adding roughly $6,884,611,200 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: the United States' population (343M) is about 132.7× Botswana's (3M), 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.

More United States comparisons