About DebtAtlas

Why this exists

Federal debt is reported as one enormous national figure. State debt sits in fifty separate budget offices. Local debt is spread across thousands of counties, school districts, and utility authorities that nobody adds together.

So an obvious question turns out to be hard to answer: what does all of it come to for one person, in one place? Every figure here is converted to dollars per resident and stacked, so you can see the whole amount and where it comes from.

What it measures

Reading the numbers fairly

Putting everything on a per-resident basis makes states comparable. It does not make them equivalent. A state with high local debt may simply pay for schools locally instead of from the state budget, and borrowing to build something that lasts forty years is a different thing from borrowing to cover payroll.

So this site does not rank states as responsible or reckless. It reports what is owed, by whom, and where the figures came from. The Sources and Methods page documents every source and vintage, including the places where the underlying data is weaker than we would like and the one case where a previously published figure turned out to be wrong.

Using the map

1. 1The bar across the top holds the national totals. Everything below it is per resident.
2. 2Switch layers to see the combined burden or isolate federal, state, and local on their own.
3. 3Darker states owe more per resident. The shading is relative to whichever layer you are viewing, so the scale changes when you switch.
4. 4Hover a state for a quick breakdown. Click to keep it open, and the address bar updates so you can send someone that exact view.
5. 5Compare mode lets you hold up to three states side by side.
6. 6Historical mode runs the map from 1940 to today. Press play and watch the whole country darken.