🇺🇸 United States vs 🇨🇳 China

Analysis

By total government debt, United States ranks 1st-largest and China ranks 2nd-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 7.9× that in China ($119,351 vs $15,185 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: United States sits at 124% of GDP, well above China's 99%, 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 narrowing: China's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($89K/sec vs $60K/sec for United States), closing the difference by roughly $2,499,465,600 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 a rough 20 years.

Scale is part of the story too: China's population (1.41B) is about 4.2× United States's (336M), 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.