🇺🇸 United States vs 🇱🇸 Lesotho

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. The United States currently owes about 28124.2× as much as Lesotho — 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 Lesotho 111th. Measured per person, the United States is 2nd and Lesotho 170th.

Analysis

By total government debt, the United States ranks 1st and Lesotho 170th 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 196.0× that in Lesotho ($118,608 vs $605 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: the United States sits at 124% of GDP, well above Lesotho's 49%, 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.

Net of financial assets: the IMF puts the United States at 97% of GDP and Lesotho at 9%, against 124% and 49% gross. The United States spends about 10% of government revenue on net interest ($980.6 billion in 2025), and Lesotho about 2.8% ($43 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 $3/sec for Lesotho), adding roughly $6,890,400,000 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: the United States' population (343M) is about 143.5× Lesotho's (2M), 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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