South Korea Real-Time Debt Clock.

Drop the numbers straight into your story

Korea Debt Clock is a public data visualization that interpolates the most recent official snapshots (Bank of Korea ECOS, Statistics Korea KOSIS, Ministry of Economy and Finance "Open Fiscal Data") second-by-second. All values and prose are licensed under CC BY 4.0 — free to reuse with attribution.

Three things to check before you quote

  1. Reference date: the number on screen is an estimate that applies an annual growth rate to the last official release (asOf). In a story, please keep “the official figure as of month/year” separate from “this site’s estimate.”
  2. Definition: “national debt” headlines a different scope in each country — D1 in Korea, central government debt in Japan, EDP debt in Spain, total federal debt in the United States. For any cross-country comparison, align the scope first.
  3. Reproducibility: when you quote a number that keeps moving, add the time-stamped snapshot API URL so readers and editors can retrieve exactly the same value later.

Definitions and formulas are set out on these pages: Glossary · Methodology

Citation formats

Examples for papers and reports, in APA 7th edition and Chicago 17th edition, followed by a short form for news use. Replace the access date with the date you actually checked, and when citing a story use the update date shown on the page as its publication date.

APA — debt clock page

WorldRealDebt. (n.d.). South Korea Debt Clock. Retrieved October 20, 2026, from https://worldrealdebt.com/

APA — explainer story

WorldRealDebt. (2026, July 31). Confuse D1, D2 and D3, and you will misread Korea's national debt. https://worldrealdebt.com/en/stories/korea-d1-d2-d3-debt/

APA — point-in-time data (API snapshot)

WorldRealDebt. (2026). South Korea Debt Clock snapshot at 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z [Data set]. https://worldrealdebt.com/api/korea/snapshot.json?t=2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Chicago — explainer story

WorldRealDebt. “Confuse D1, D2 and D3, and you will misread Korea's national debt.” Last modified July 31, 2026. Accessed October 20, 2026. https://worldrealdebt.com/en/stories/korea-d1-d2-d3-debt/.

Plain credit line for articles and broadcast, with underlying sources

South Korea Debt Clock (worldrealdebt.com/korea), accessed YYYY-MM-DD.
Underlying sources: Bank of Korea ECOS, Statistics Korea KOSIS,
Ministry of Economy and Finance "Open Fiscal Data", KITA.

Embed widget

To place a live counter in an article or blog, paste the iframe below. The widget reads this site’s public data files, updates the number in the reader’s browser, and shows a source link underneath.

<iframe src="https://worldrealdebt.com/widget?country=korea&metric=nationalDebt&lang=en&theme=auto" width="400" height="200" style="border:0;max-width:100%;" loading="lazy" title="WorldRealDebt widget"></iframe>

URL parameters: country (korea, china, japan, usa, spain), metric, lang (ko, en, ja, zh, es, fr), currency (KRW, USD, JPY, EUR, CNY), theme (dark, light, auto), size (sm, md, lg), accent (#RRGGBB) and showSource (0 hides the source line — if you do that, credit the source in your text). Unsupported values fall back to the defaults.

Supported metrics: nationalDebt, householdDebt, debtPerCitizen, gdp, debtToGDP, fiscalBalance, population, foreignReserves

The widget studio (/widget/studio/) lets you preview the widget and copy iframe, Markdown or WordPress code. For usage statistics the widget records only the host page’s origin (its site address), never the full page URL.

Public JSON API

Response fields and a sample response are in the API documentation.

Licence

Text, charts, explainers, glossary entries and API responses produced by this site are released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). You may copy, distribute and adapt them, including commercially, as long as you credit “WorldRealDebt” with a link to the original page and indicate any changes you made.

The underlying data of source institutions — the Bank of Korea, statistics offices, finance ministries and others — is not covered by CC BY 4.0 and remains subject to each institution’s terms. When you quote the primary data directly, please name the institution and release date listed on the sources page.

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