Colombia's government debt multiplied by twelve. That tells you less than you think

In August 2002, Colombia’s central government owed 99.37 trillion pesos. In May 2026 it owes 1,169.90 trillion.

Almost twelve times more.

It is a huge number, it is true, and it is close to useless. Because over those same twenty-four years prices rose, the population grew and nominal GDP multiplied several times over. Comparing nominal debt stocks across 2002 and 2026 is like comparing your father’s 1995 salary with yours today: the bigger number does not win.

This article is about the three ways of measuring the same debt — and why they give three different answers — and about the one thing that genuinely changed over the last four years, which is not the amount.

The size of the thing

Before the percentages, the scale. This is what the central government owed at the end of 2025, the last complete annual measurement:

Every Colombian — newborns included — carries the equivalent of twenty-two million pesos of central government debt. A note on language: what Spanish calls $1.192,6 billones de pesos is 1,192.6 trillion pesos in English. The two languages use the words in opposite ways, and that alone ruins a fair number of translated headlines.

Trap 1: the nominal stock always rises

Colombia’s nominal debt has never fallen under any administration. Not one. And that is not a scandal: with positive inflation and a growing economy, a stock that does not rise in current pesos means the state is repaying faster than it issues, which almost no country does for long.

Which is why the “how much each president added” table in current pesos is the most quoted and the least informative comparison there is:

Trillion current pesos. Source: Ministry of Finance monthly public debt series.

Read this way, every administration borrowed more than the last — which is true, and also close to inevitable: each starts from a larger base in a currency worth less. Santos raised debt by 137% and Petro by 45%, but Petro added more pesos. Both statements are correct, and both can be used to build opposite headlines from the same data.

To measure anything, you have to divide by the size of the economy. That is where the second problem starts.

Trap 2: gross or net?

There are two official debt figures for Colombia’s central government, and they look alike enough to be confused:

• Gross debt: everything the government owes.
• Net debt: what it owes, minus the financial assets it holds.

The gap is not small. According to the Autonomous Fiscal Rule Committee (CARF):

Six points of GDP apart in 2025. And look at the full year: gross debt rose — from 63.9% to 64.7% — and net debt fell — from 59.3% to 58.5%. Same country, same year, opposite directions, and both figures are official.

And the detail that matters: the fiscal rule is measured on net debt, not gross. Which is why net is the figure the government quotes and gross is the one its critics quote. Neither is lying; they are using two different yardsticks.

This is where most of the analysis in circulation falls apart. If someone shows you a gross stock — those 1,169.9 trillion pesos — next to a percentage that belongs to the net series, the result is a number that does not exist. I ran into exactly that pairing while checking the material for this article: a May 2026 gross stock placed next to 59.4%, which is the net debt figure for February 2026. Gross that same month was 62.0%.

Three points of GDP is about 55 trillion pesos. That is not a rounding detail.

Trap 3: which GDP?

The third one is the subtlest. To compute debt over GDP you have to pick a GDP, and in April 2026 nobody yet knows what 2026 GDP will be. Each institution uses its own projection, and that alone produces one- or two-point differences between figures that are all otherwise correct.

Divide the 1,192.6 trillion of 2025 gross debt by 2025 GDP (1,853.9 trillion) and you get 64.3%, not the 64.7% CARF publishes. The difference is which GDP estimate each one used, and when.

Hence the practical rule: a debt figure without a source and a date is worthless. And if it does not say gross or net, less than worthless.

Where the debt stands today

With the three traps on the table, these are the most recent official figures:

• Gross central government debt: 62.9% of GDP in April 2026, per CARF’s fiscal monitoring. Down 1.8 points from March, but 2.1 points above April 2025.
• Net debt: 58.5% of GDP at the close of 2025 — the fourth highest since the series began in 1999.
• CARF warns that the 2025 decline in net debt did not come from fiscal adjustment but from peso appreciation and debt management operations. Without those two effects it would have crossed 60%.

In short: the debt is not stabilised. It sits at its second-highest level on record and came down slightly for reasons that do not repeat on their own next year.

So why did Colombia borrow?

So far this has been about how much and in which currency. The real question is still missing, and it is the one people actually ask: why did the country end up here?

The answer is not a scandal or a single decision. Debt is an arithmetic outcome: it is the sum of every year in which the government spent more than it collected. Here is what one ordinary year looks like — 2025, the last one closed:

For every 100 pesos the central government spent in 2025, it collected 72 and borrowed 28. That gap is covered by issuing debt, and the following year it starts again. In 2024 the gap was 6.7% of GDP; in 2025, 6.4%.

This is not a bad year. It is the shape of the Colombian budget, and has been for decades. There are four reasons it does not close on its own.

1. Colombia collects little tax

Total tax revenue came to 19.9% of GDP in 2024. The Latin America and Caribbean average is 21.7%, and the OECD average is 34.1%.

The part that stings: that 19.9% is essentially the same level as 2015, even though Colombia passes a tax reform roughly every two years. The rules change often and collection, measured against the size of the economy, stays where it was.

2. Spending barely moves

63% of 2026 operating expenses are locked in by constitutional rules, according to Corficolombiana’s count across 2,265 budget lines:

Pensions, health and transfers to departments and municipalities cannot be cut by administrative decision: they sit in the constitution and in statute. A finance minister who wants to adjust opens the budget and finds two of every three pesos already committed before sitting down.

3. Shocks arrive and do not leave

In 2020 net debt went from 48.4% to 60.7% of GDP in a single year — twelve points. The pandemic forced spending on subsidies and health while GDP contracted, which is the worst possible combination for a debt ratio: the numerator rises and the denominator falls at the same time.

Six years on, the country is still above where it stood in 2019. And before the pandemic something similar had happened with the 2014 oil collapse: Colombia funds a meaningful share of its budget with oil revenue, and when the barrel falls the gap opens without anyone deciding to spend more.

4. Interest turns into new debt

This is the one almost nobody mentions, and the most important for understanding why the problem accelerates.

Of the 117.8 trillion gap in 2025, 52.1 trillion was interest. Almost half of a single year’s deficit is not new spending on anything: it is the price of debt that already existed. That is financed by issuing more debt, which generates more interest the following year. It is a snowball, and it rolls by itself.

And here is the figure that ties it together: the primary deficit — the gap excluding interest — was 3.5% of GDP. Even if Colombia owed nothing and paid no interest at all, it would still spend more than it collects.

Which is why no administration has reduced nominal debt. Not because all of them were reckless, but because a structural gap does not close inside one four-year term. It closes by collecting more, spending less, or growing faster than the debt. Of those three, the last costs nobody any votes — and it is the one that has been missing for a decade.

What did change: the currency

Now the good part — and one that is barely discussed, because it does not fit into a fight.

What actually separates one administration from another on debt is not how much it owes. It is which currency it owes in.

Read it top to bottom and the story tells itself:

Uribe moved into pesos. He inherited debt split roughly half and half and left it 71% in local currency. His was the administration that built the domestic TES market.

Santos left it roughly as he found it. From 71% to 67.7%. He expanded the volume without moving the structure much.

Duque moved into dollars. The external share went from 32.3% to 40.2%. That was less a decision than a pandemic: in 2020 the fast money was at the multilaterals — the IMF, the IDB, the World Bank — and that money is denominated in dollars.

Petro moved back into pesos, hard. The external share fell to 24.6%, and CARF confirms that by April 2026 it stood at 26.6% of the total, the lowest since July 2014. Domestic debt went from 481.6 to 881.7 trillion pesos over the same stretch.

That is a structural change, and it is the only one of the four you can call a portfolio decision rather than a consequence of circumstances.

The fine print on external debt that “fell”

Careful here, because it is easy to tell this one wrong in the opposite direction.

External debt fell from 323.4 to 288.2 trillion measured in pesos. That drop has three separate components, and CARF names them: prepayment of total return swap operations, cancellation of global bonds, and the exchange rate effect.

The third one is not repayment. It is the peso appreciating. Dollar debt that nobody touches is worth fewer pesos when the dollar falls and more when it rises. Saying “we paid down external debt” while showing only the peso figure hides how much of the fall is management and how much is the currency market doing its job.

The prepayments are real and verifiable. The currency effect is real too — and reversible: if the dollar climbs again, that same debt weighs more without anyone issuing a single new peso.

What moving into pesos costs

Borrowing at home has a defensible logic: it shields the national balance sheet from the dollar. A country that owes in its own currency does not default because of a devaluation.

But it is not free. Peso rates are higher than the dollar rates the multilaterals charge, and that cost shows up every year, on the same budget line.

Debt service in 2027 comes to 155.4 trillion pesos: 24.5% of the entire budget and 7.3% of GDP. That is a 54.7% jump from the 100.4 trillion of 2026.

And the figure that sums it up: interest alone, at 94.4 trillion, is larger than the country’s entire investment budget of 86.9 trillion.

Investment means roads, schools, water systems, hospitals, connectivity. The country will pay its creditors more than it pays its own infrastructure. That is not an opinion about this administration — the trend predates it and the next one inherits it — it is budget arithmetic.

How to read a debt figure

Four questions worth asking of any debt headline you meet:

1. Gross or net? Six points of GDP apart. If it does not say, you do not know what you are reading.
2. As of when, and against which GDP? A debt ratio without a date and without the GDP behind it is not comparable to anything.
3. Stock or change? The stock always rises. What informs is the stock against the size of the economy.
4. How much of the change is the exchange rate? In a country with a quarter of its debt in foreign currency, the dollar moves the number without anyone paying or issuing anything.

Those four will put you ahead of most headlines, and ahead of a good share of the analysis circulating online.

How this was built

The peso stocks come from the Ministry of Finance monthly public debt series, taken at each presidential cut-off, in trillion current pesos. The domestic and external amounts for 2002, 2010 and 2018 are derived from the total stock and the reported share of each component; those for 2022 and 2026 are reported directly.

The GDP ratios come from the Autonomous Fiscal Rule Committee, which publishes the official gross and net debt series. I do not publish ratios here for years before 2019, because the series in circulation for those years mix gross and net definitions and GDP base changes, and splicing them would produce a comparison that looks clean and is not.

The most recent stock cut-off is May 2026; the most recent gross ratio is April 2026. They are not the same month, which is why I do not multiply one by the other.

Budget figures are from the 2027 national budget, under discussion at the time of writing.

The full series is available in the file attached to this article.

From macro down to ground level

This is the state. If what interests you is how companies borrow — how much they owe, what they pay in financial expenses, whether operations cover it — that is public too, company by company, in the directory of 29,312 Colombian companies.

It is the same question at a different scale, and down there the answer really does change from one company to the next.

Sources

• Ministry of Finance — Public debt
• CARF — Fiscal monitoring, April 2026
• La República — Gross central government debt closed at 62.9% of GDP in April
• La República — Net debt closed 2025 at 58.5% of GDP, the fourth highest on record
• La República — Nearly 1 in every 4 pesos of next year’s budget goes to debt
• El Colombiano — Public debt grew 169 trillion pesos in a year
• El Nuevo Siglo — Colombia’s 2025 fiscal deficit reached 6.4% of GDP
• El Tiempo — Despite repeated tax reforms, collection as a share of GDP is where it was a decade ago
• El Tiempo — Two thirds of operating spending is locked in by constitutional rules
• CARF — Report to Congress