🇺🇸 United States vs 🇮🇷 Iran

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. The United States currently owes about 326.1× as much as Iran — a gap of $40.27 trillion. Updated every second from each country's baseline figure; sources below.

🇺🇸
United States
$40,396,675,527,474
Debt-to-GDP124%
Per citizen$117,830
Per second+$60,200
VS
🇮🇷
Iran
$123,876,096,876
Debt-to-GDP36%
Per citizen$1,409
Per second−$315
In nominal terms, the United States carries the larger government debt — roughly 326.1× that of Iran, a difference of $40.27 trillion. Debt-to-GDP (United States: 124%, Iran: 36%) says more about the burden than the raw total does.

Among the 135 governments tracked here, the United States ranks 12th by debt-to-GDP and Iran 106th. Measured per person, the United States is 2nd and Iran 111th.

Analysis

By total government debt, the United States ranks 1st and Iran 55th among the 135 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 83.6× that in Iran ($117,830 vs $1,409 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: the United States sits at 124% of GDP, well above Iran's 36%, 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 gap between them is widening: the United States' debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($60K/sec vs −$315/sec for Iran), adding roughly $5,228,496,000 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: the United States' population (343M) is about 3.9× Iran's (88M), 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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Source: Global Debt Clock, based on the IMF World Economic Outlook (October 2026, general government gross debt) and US Treasury data for the United States.
Live data: /api/compare?a=us&b=ir · United States page · Iran page
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