Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. United States currently owes about 109.8× more — a gap of $39.54 trillion. Updated every second from IMF baselines.
By total government debt, South Africa ranks 27th-largest and United States ranks 1st-largest among the 137 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 national debt in United States is roughly 20.3× that in South Africa ($118,739 vs $5,859 per person).
The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: United States sits at 124% of GDP, well above South Africa's 79%, meaning 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: United States's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($60K/sec vs $800/sec for South Africa), adding roughly $5,132,160,000 to the difference each day.
Scale is part of the story too: United States's population (336M) is about 5.4× South Africa's (62M), 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.