🇺🇸 United States vs 🇸🇪 Sweden

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. The United States currently owes about 157.6× as much as Sweden — a gap of $40.11 trillion. Updated every second from each country's baseline figure; sources below.

🇺🇸
United States
$40,369,282,544,727
Debt-to-GDP124%
Per citizen$117,750
Per second+$60,200
VS
🇸🇪
Sweden
$256,084,254,983
Debt-to-GDP35%
Per citizen$23,799
Per second+$878
In nominal terms, the United States carries the larger government debt — roughly 157.6× that of Sweden, a difference of $40.11 trillion. Debt-to-GDP (United States: 124%, Sweden: 35%) says more about the burden than the raw total does.

Among the 135 governments tracked here, the United States ranks 12th by debt-to-GDP and Sweden 108th. Measured per person, the United States is 2nd and Sweden 29th.

Analysis

By total government debt, the United States ranks 1st and Sweden 39th 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 4.9× that in Sweden ($117,750 vs $23,799 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: the United States sits at 124% of GDP, well above Sweden's 35%, 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 $878/sec for Sweden), adding roughly $5,125,420,800 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: the United States' population (343M) is about 31.9× Sweden'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.

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Source: Global Debt Clock, based on the IMF World Economic Outlook (October 2026, general government gross debt) and US Treasury data for the United States.
Live data: /api/compare?a=us&b=se · United States page · Sweden page
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