Government debt

Everything a country's governments owe, as a share of its GDP.

General government gross debt is everything a country's governments owe: central, state and local government and social security funds together. It covers loans, bonds and other liabilities that must be repaid with interest, and is shown as a share of GDP so that countries of different sizes can be compared. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) publishes it in its World Economic Outlook. We show past years only and leave out the IMF's forecasts; the latest year can still be an IMF estimate.

World map · Gross debt, % of GDP

Year

Source: IMF, World Economic Outlook (October 2026) · fetched 26 Oct 2026

Over time · Gross debt, % of GDP

Source: IMF, World Economic Outlook (October 2026) · fetched 26 Oct 2026

Years

Show the numbers

Download CSV JSON

Every country and year, with the source on each row.

About the author

Hello there, I’m Klaus Jürgen Folz. I studied Mechanical Engineering at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Brazil, and I work in Austria as a lead Python and Power BI developer. I built Data Mechanics because good decisions start with facts. Public data is often scattered, hard to find or locked behind paywalls, and too much of what we read about the world is biased. Here, every number is shown as it was published, next to its source, so anyone can check it, compare countries and leaders, and draw their own conclusions.

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