Pakistan's total external debt nearly doubled over a decade to $135.1 billion in 2025, up from $68.67 billion in 2015, according to the World Bank's International Debt Report 2026. The finding, published on Friday, covers the decade ending in 2025 and was reported by Bloom Pakistan and Pakistan Point, citing the World Bank report.

The total was made up of $107.08 billion in public and publicly guaranteed debt, $17.58 billion in private non-guaranteed debt and $10.45 billion in short-term debt. The figures cover external borrowing across categories of borrowers, not only loans taken directly by the federal government, so the total should not be read as federal government borrowing alone.

China remains the largest single creditor

China remained Pakistan's largest individual creditor, with about $22.4 billion outstanding in 2025, followed by the World Bank itself at $19.2 billion and the Asian Development Bank at $16.83 billion. Multilateral institutions together held $56.8 billion of Pakistan's public and publicly guaranteed external debt.

The report also found that the external debt of low- and middle-income countries as a whole reached a record $9.4 trillion in 2025, with repayment pressures continuing to rise. For Pakistan, the figures underline a continued reliance on external financing and the scale of the repayment obligations that come with it.

What the figures do not show

The World Bank figures are a stock of debt at the end of 2025, not a measure of new borrowing in a single year. The report's breakdown shows where the debt is owed, but it does not by itself settle how the burden should be managed, and no government response to the latest figures was included in the reports used for this story.

Sources: Bloom Pakistan; Pakistan Point.