🇺🇸 United States vs 🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. The United States currently owes about 2376.8× as much as Papua New Guinea — a gap of $40.35 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 Papua New Guinea 80th. Measured per person, the United States is 2nd and Papua New Guinea 106th.

Analysis

By total government debt, the United States ranks 1st and Papua New Guinea 106th 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 73.6× that in Papua New Guinea ($117,750 vs $1,600 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: the United States sits at 124% of GDP, well above Papua New Guinea'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 −$4/sec for Papua New Guinea), adding roughly $5,201,625,600 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: the United States' population (343M) is about 32.3× Papua New Guinea's (11M), 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