🇺🇸 United States vs 🇱🇰 Sri Lanka

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. The United States currently owes about 383.0× as much as Sri Lanka — a gap of $40.26 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 Sri Lanka 21st. Measured per person, the United States is 2nd and Sri Lanka 76th.

Analysis

By total government debt, the United States ranks 1st and Sri Lanka 58th 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 24.4× that in Sri Lanka ($117,750 vs $4,820 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: the United States sits at 124% of GDP, well above Sri Lanka's 97%, 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 $0.78/sec for Sri Lanka), adding roughly $5,201,212,608 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: the United States' population (343M) is about 15.7× Sri Lanka's (22M), 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