Credit to the general government as a share of GDP
What the state owes as a share of a year's output; shown for context because no published line separates safe from unsafe, and the level explains how much room a government has to respond.
Public debt is the mirror of private debt: when households and firms stop borrowing, the government usually starts, and a downturn that arrives with public debt already high leaves less room to respond. There is no threshold because there is no agreed line. Reinhart and Rogoff's 90 percent did not survive replication, Japan has carried more than twice that for a decade at low rates, and the level that matters depends on who holds the debt, in what currency and at what rate.
The series are the BIS's core debt measure: loans and debt securities of the general government, consolidated, at market value. It sits below the gross figures the IMF reports, which add pension and other liabilities, and for China it leaves out most local-government financing vehicles, which the IMF counts as augmented debt. India is not covered by the BIS series. Added in September 2026 after an outside review noted that the site carried no fiscal series at all.
On this site
- Government debt, % of GDP China 101.1 % Context
- Government debt, % of GDP Eurozone 85.6 % Context
- Government debt, % of GDP Japan 175.6 % Context
- Government debt, % of GDP United Kingdom 86.5 % Context
- Government debt, % of GDP United States 110.8 % Context