🇺🇸 United States vs 🇨🇻 Cabo Verde

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. The United States currently owes about 10996.7× as much as Cabo Verde — 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, the United States ranks 13th by debt-to-GDP and Cabo Verde 15th. Measured per person, the United States is 2nd and Cabo Verde 82nd.

Analysis

By total government debt, the United States ranks 1st and Cabo Verde 155th 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 16.6× that in Cabo Verde ($118,608 vs $7,153 per person).

Both countries carry debt above 100% of GDP — the United States at 124% and Cabo Verde at 115% — meaning each owes more than a full year's worth of national output. What that means for each depends on who holds the debt, in what currency and at what interest rate.

Net of financial assets the order flips: the IMF puts the United States at 97% of GDP and Cabo Verde at 104%, against 124% and 115% gross. The United States spends about 10% of government revenue on net interest ($980.6 billion in 2025), and Cabo Verde about 7.1% ($61 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 $6/sec for Cabo Verde), adding roughly $6,890,140,800 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: the United States' population (343M) is about 663.2× Cabo Verde's (1M), 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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