🇻🇺 Vanuatu vs 🇺🇸 United States

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. The United States currently owes about 81455.4× as much as Vanuatu — 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, Vanuatu ranks 143rd by debt-to-GDP and the United States 13th. Measured per person, Vanuatu is 138th and the United States 2nd.

Analysis

By total government debt, Vanuatu ranks 183rd and the United States 1st 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 81.3× that in Vanuatu ($118,608 vs $1,460 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: the United States sits at 124% of GDP, well above Vanuatu's 36%, 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 IMF puts the United States at 97% of GDP net of financial assets, and publishes no net debt figure for Vanuatu. Vanuatu spends about 1.6% of government revenue on net interest ($8 million in 2025), and the United States about 10% ($980.6 billion 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 $1/sec for Vanuatu), adding roughly $6,890,572,800 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: the United States' population (343M) is about 1002.4× Vanuatu's (0M), 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 Vanuatu comparisons