🇺🇸 United States vs 🇸🇸 South Sudan

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. The United States currently owes about 11698.1× as much as South Sudan — 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 South Sudan 70th. Measured per person, the United States is 2nd and South Sudan 186th.

Analysis

By total government debt, the United States ranks 1st and South Sudan 156th 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 424.3× that in South Sudan ($118,608 vs $280 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: the United States sits at 124% of GDP, well above South Sudan's 64%, 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 South Sudan at 64%, against 124% and 64% gross. The United States spends about 10% of government revenue on net interest ($980.6 billion in 2025), and South Sudan about 6.5% ($77 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 South Sudan), adding roughly $6,890,918,400 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: the United States' population (343M) is about 27.6× South Sudan's (12M), 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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