Pakistan's total external debt has almost doubled over the past decade, climbing to $135.1 billion by the end of 2025, according to the World Bank's International Debt Report 2026, published on Thursday, 5 November. The figures lay bare the scale of the borrowing that has built up over ten years — and the repayments now falling due.
The report puts Pakistan's external debt stock at $135.107 billion at the end of 2025, up from $68.673 billion in 2015. That is an increase of roughly $66.4 billion, or 96.7 percent, over the ten-year period. The stock also rose from $129.92 billion at the end of 2024, meaning Pakistan added more than $5 billion in external liabilities in a single year.
Most of the debt sits with the public sector. Public and publicly guaranteed borrowing accounted for $107.076 billion of the total, the report shows, while private-sector debt not guaranteed by the government stood at $17.58 billion and short-term debt at $10.45 billion. The figures cover all external borrowing recorded in the World Bank's debt statistics, not only loans taken directly by the federal government.
China remains Pakistan's largest individual creditor, with $22.4 billion outstanding at the end of 2025 — roughly 53 percent of the country's total bilateral debt, according to the report. The World Bank itself is the second-largest creditor, owed $19.2 billion, followed by the Asian Development Bank with $16.83 billion. Together, the three account for well over two-fifths of everything Pakistan owes abroad.
The terms on which Pakistan borrowed in 2025 varied sharply depending on the lender. New commitments from official creditors carried an average interest rate of 3.6 percent, with an average maturity of about 16 years and a four-year grace period before repayments begin. Borrowing from private creditors, by contrast, came at an average interest rate of 8.6 percent, with shorter repayment periods — a reminder of how much more expensive market borrowing has become.
Two developments in 2025 helped ease the immediate pressure. China extended the repayment period for $2 billion of loans to Pakistan during the year, while the International Monetary Fund provided $2.3 billion in fresh financing under its Extended Fund Facility and its Resilience and Sustainability Facility, supporting the country's longer-term economic stability. The rollovers and new financing arrived as Pakistan worked through its IMF programme and rebuilt its foreign exchange reserves.
Even so, the weight of servicing the debt remains heavy. Debt servicing consumed 33 percent of Pakistan's export earnings, according to the report's data, underlining how much of what the country earns abroad is absorbed by repayments before it can be spent on imports, investment or development. That burden is one reason the government has been pressed to widen the tax base and lift exports, themes the IMF has raised repeatedly in its reviews of the economy.
Pakistan's experience is part of a much wider trend. External debt across low- and middle-income countries rose 5.5 percent to a record $9.4 trillion in 2025, the sharpest increase in four years, as bond issuance rebounded, the US dollar weakened and investors returned to emerging-market lending. The World Bank's report shows borrowing accelerating across the developing world, not only in Pakistan.
The numbers arrive at a moment when Pakistan's external position looks stronger on the surface than it has for years. The State Bank's foreign exchange reserves hit a record $26.86 billion this week, and the government has pointed to loan rollovers from friendly countries and a planned Eurobond issue as evidence that its external accounts are comfortable. The debt report is a reminder that the stock of obligations behind those headlines is still growing, and that reserves and rollovers manage the pressure rather than removing it.
What happens next will depend on whether Pakistan can keep repayments affordable while lifting the earnings that service them. Economists will be watching the pace of exports, the outcome of the IMF programme's reviews, and whether bilateral creditors extend further relief, as they did in 2025. The World Bank's next debt report will show whether the stock keeps climbing — or whether a decade of near-doubling finally begins to level off.
All figures in this report are from the World Bank's International Debt Report 2026, checked at 18:52 PKT on 6 November 2026.
This post is market news information only, not financial advice.
