🇺🇸 United States vs 🇰🇷 South Korea

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. The United States currently owes about 38.5× as much as South Korea — a gap of $39.32 trillion. Updated every second from each country's baseline figure; sources below.

Among the 135 governments tracked here, the United States ranks 12th by debt-to-GDP and South Korea 76th. Measured per person, the United States is 2nd and South Korea 34th.

Analysis

By total government debt, the United States ranks 1st and South Korea 15th 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 5.8× that in South Korea ($117,749 vs $20,294 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: the United States sits at 124% of GDP, well above South Korea's 52%, 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 $2K/sec for South Korea), adding roughly $4,993,920,000 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: the United States' population (343M) is about 6.6× South Korea's (52M), 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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