Every Pakistani citizen now carries a debt of roughly Rs325,000. A newborn carries it. A labourer carries it. A pensioner carries it. Even the 107 million Pakistanis living below the poverty line carry a share of the national debt, including those who have never had a bank account, taken a bank loan or borrowed a single rupee from anyone. The government borrowed the money, but the bill belongs to the people. It will be paid through their taxes, their children’s taxes and, if the present trajectory continues, their grandchildren’s taxes. That is the uncomfortable reality behind Pakistan’s reassuring talk of economic stabilisation.
Some of the good news is real. Inflation has fallen from its 2023 peak. Foreign exchange reserves have improved. The IMF programme is moving forward. But stabilisation does not mean that the underlying problem has disappeared. It means, at best, that the immediate crisis has been contained. Beneath the calmer headlines sits a debt burden that continues to grow. Pakistan spent around Rs12 trillion servicing debt and liabilities last fiscal year. For 2026-27, the government has budgeted Rs8.054 trillion for debt servicing alone, almost 43 percent of the entire federal budget of Rs18.771 trillion. Before the state can build a school, equip a hospital, repair a road or invest in development, nearly half of its budget is already committed to the past.
This is the part of the debt story that rarely reaches the ordinary citizen. Debt is not simply a number sitting in an account at the State Bank. It is money that cannot be spent somewhere else. Every rupee directed towards interest payments is a rupee unavailable for education, health, infrastructure or employment. When debt servicing absorbs such a large share of the budget, the state does not merely become financially constrained. Its ability to improve people’s lives is constrained with it.
The direction of travel is even more worrying. Pakistan’s public debt stood at around Rs80.5 trillion in June 2025 and rose to roughly Rs83.6 trillion by June 2026. Total debt and liabilities are approaching the extraordinary figure of Rs100 trillion. The state has also increasingly relied on borrowing to meet repayment obligations. When new borrowing is used to repay old principal rather than to create productive capacity, the country is not escaping its debt problem. It is moving it forward, with interest attached.
And this is where the debt crisis reaches beyond Islamabad’s balance sheets and into the lives of ordinary Pakistanis. Government borrowing on such a scale competes with businesses and households for money in the financial system. The consequences are familiar. A young entrepreneur cannot obtain affordable financing. A manufacturer postpones buying machinery. A small business gives up plans to expand. A farmer struggles to secure affordable credit. What appears to be a problem of public finance in government documents becomes a problem of private investment, jobs and incomes in the real economy.
Pakistan also remains vulnerable to developments beyond its borders. Higher global interest rates, a strong dollar and volatile commodity prices make external borrowing more expensive and increase the pressure on a country that must constantly find dollars to pay its external obligations. Pakistan’s exports and remittances are not simply sources of foreign exchange anymore. They are part of a continuous struggle to meet import payments and debt-service requirements. This is why every balance-of-payments crisis eventually looks familiar. The country runs short of dollars, turns to the IMF, receives temporary relief, imposes austerity, stabilises briefly and then begins accumulating the same underlying imbalances again.
There is an even deeper problem. Pakistan has spent decades trying to solve a revenue problem through borrowing. Governments change, slogans change and economic teams change, but the basic equation remains remarkably stubborn. The state spends more than it collects and then borrows to bridge the gap. Meanwhile, the country’s narrow tax base leaves large sections of economic activity outside meaningful taxation. The result is a system in which those with the least political and economic power often bear the consequences of decisions made by those with the most.
That is why the Rs325,000 figure matters. It puts an abstract national crisis into a language every citizen can understand. A debt of Rs83.6 trillion may sound like an impossibly large number. Divide it among the population and it becomes a liability attached to every Pakistani. No citizen was asked whether they wanted it. No family signed for it. No child born tomorrow will have the opportunity to refuse it. Yet all of them will help pay it.
Pakistan does not need another illusion that an IMF programme alone can solve this problem. Nor can permanent austerity imposed on ordinary citizens substitute for structural reform. Debt can only be brought under control when the country begins collecting substantially more revenue from those who have the greatest capacity to pay, broadens the tax base, brings agricultural income and real estate into a credible tax framework, reduces unnecessary exemptions and stops treating borrowing as the easiest answer whenever expenditure exceeds revenue.
Pakistan cannot keep borrowing its way out of a crisis created by borrowing. Every new loan may postpone the reckoning, but it also adds another charge to the future. Rs325,000 per citizen is not merely a statistic. It is a debt inherited by people who never approved it, never spent most of it and may spend decades paying for it. The most frightening part is not the size of the bill. It is that we are still adding to it.