🇺🇸 United States vs 🇲🇻 Maldives

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. The United States currently owes about 3854.3× as much as the Maldives — a gap of $40.65 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 the Maldives 10th. Measured per person, the United States is 2nd and the Maldives 38th.

Analysis

By total government debt, the United States ranks 1st and the Maldives 134th 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 6.0× that in the Maldives ($118,608 vs $19,918 per person).

Both countries carry debt above 100% of GDP — the United States at 124% and the Maldives at 129% — 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.

The IMF puts the United States at 97% of GDP net of financial assets, and publishes no net debt figure for the Maldives. The United States spends about 10% of government revenue on net interest ($980.6 billion in 2025), and the Maldives about 12% ($313 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 $19/sec for the Maldives), adding roughly $6,889,017,600 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: the United States' population (343M) is about 647.3× the Maldives' (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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