Which govs borrow the most (1 map)

The elephant in the room is China. While China appears to have a "normal" debt load when you include their shadow banking system, corporate and household borrowing the ratio goes up to a whopping 288%. Not good!

Couple that with a massively overbuilt real estate sectors and a demographic crisis and ouch!!!

The US has it's own runaway budget deficit which sadly compared to to the rest of the globe is pretty typical now. One reason for that is that prior to the pandemic interest rates were practically zero. This created an incentive for nations to stock up on debt.

Key Takeaways

• The global debt-to-GDP ratio rose 2.3 percentage points to 94.7% in 2025, but is still below the pandemic-era peak of 98.7% in 2020.

• Japan remains the world’s most indebted nation at 230% of GDP, followed by Sudan (222%) and Singapore (176%).

Global debt levels continue to rise, with 2025 marking another year of fiscal strain across both advanced and developing economies.

This map shows how much each country’s government debt compares to its economic output, measured as debt-to-GDP ratio, offering insight into fiscal resilience and vulnerability worldwide.

Data & Discussion

The data for this visualization comes from the latest update by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to their World Economic Outlook as of October 2025.

It measures general government gross debt as a percentage of GDP across more than 190 countries for 2025, which are all in the data table below.