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Sovereign debt / CYP

Cyprus

Latest government debt 65.3% of GDP (2024, General govt (IMF GDD)). 1 sovereign-debt crisis episode on record, in 2013.

Country financial profile →

Full crisis history (banking, currency, sovereign) →

Cyprus’s latest debt of 65.3% is below the 80.7% median at which sovereign crises of the 2000+ era began. This is a comparison, not a prediction. A country can default well below these medians (Argentina defaulted in 2001 at 48.0% of GDP) or carry one of the world’s highest ratios without defaulting (Japan, above 230%). Default risk turns on debt composition, fiscal capacity, credit history and market access, not the level alone.

Official risk classification

Current classification
Exempt
category 0 or blank in the OECD list · as of Jun 26, 2026
EffectiveClassification
Feb 1, 2008Exempt or unclassified (no 1-7 category)current
Jan 27, 2006Category 2 of 7
Oct 27, 2000Category 3 of 7
Oct 14, 1999Category 4 of 7
Jan 1, 1999Category 3 of 7

The CRC scores the likelihood a country services its external debt on an eight-step scale, from 0 to 7, and sets the minimum premiums the OECD Arrangement participants charge on officially supported export credit. Categories 1 to 7 are the risk ladder (1 lowest, 7 highest). Category 0 marks high-income OECD and high-income euro-area economies whose credit is priced on market terms. This layer shows category 0 and a blank row as the same exempt state, so an exempt reading is not a zero-risk rating and does not on its own separate an exemption from a market the OECD never classified.

Source: OECD, Country Risk Classifications of the Participants to the Arrangement on Officially Supported Export Credits OECD CRC, free reuse with attribution. Category is an ordinal 0-7 risk step, not a probability; 0 and blank denote exemption. Methodology

Debt to GDP trajectory

Debt to GDP by perimeter, observed years only (no IMF forecast years). Household and nonfinancial corporate IMF GDD series are plotted separately where reported. Where neither component is reported, the private sector, aggregate (no household/corporate split published) is shown as a coverage fallback, not as a third private component. Shaded bands are sovereign-debt crisis years.

General government (GDD)Central government (GDD)General government (WEO)Household (GDD)Nonfinancial corporate (GDD)
% of GDP

Source: IMF Global Debt Database (Mbaye, Moreno-Badia & Chae, IMF WP/18/111) | IMF World Economic Outlook Debt is % of GDP; household and nonfinancial corporate GDD series are plotted separately. Where both components are unavailable, the fallback is private sector, aggregate (no household/corporate split published). Crisis-year shading comes from the sovereign-debt chronologies. Methodology

Debt profile

Latest by perimeter
General government (IMF GDD)
65.3% (2024)
Central government (IMF GDD)
100.2% (2024)
General gov gross (IMF WEO, April 2026 edition)
62.8% (2024)
Household (IMF GDD)
59.6% (2024)
Nonfinancial corporate (IMF GDD)
125.4% (2024)
History
Peak debt
113.6% (2020)
Sovereign crises
1
Last crisis
2013
Vs 2000+ crisis-start median
-15.4

Quarterly debt (World Bank QPSD)

A higher-frequency companion to the annual IMF figures above: general government gross debt, quarter by quarter, from the World Bank Quarterly Public Sector Debt database.

Latest quarter (General government)
66.9%
2025Q4 · $28.56B
Annual, for comparison (General government (IMF GDD))
65.3%
2024 · different perimeter and valuation
0.050.01001502000200220042006200820102012201420162018202020222024

QPSD and the annual IMF WEO/GDD series are not the same measure: coverage of the public sector and the valuation of instruments (nominal, face or market value) can differ, so a quarterly QPSD reading and an annual IMF reading for the same period need not match. Read the quarterly line as within-year timing, not as a re-statement of the annual ratio.

Source: World Bank Quarterly Public Sector Debt (QPSD) World Bank QPSD, CC BY 4.0. General government gross debt, percent of GDP; 1998Q4 to 2025Q4. Methodology

External debt (World Bank IDS)

No IDS external-debt series for Cyprus. The World Bank’s International Debt Statistics is compiled from the Debtor Reporting System, so a country is covered only while it reports to that system.

Debt in default (BoC-BoE CRAG)

Stock of Cyprus’s government debt in default in 2013, from the Bank of Canada–Bank of England Sovereign Default Database, broken down by creditor class. The external total is $1.70B (current US dollars, excluding domestic arrears, matching the database’s published headline). A further $13.6M of domestic (fiscal) arrears is tracked separately and is not included in that total.

Creditor class (2013)Amount in default
Foreign-currency bonds$1.70B
Total external$1.70B

Source: BoC-BoE Sovereign Default Database 2025 (Beers, Ndukwe & Berry, Bank of Canada SAN 2025-24) BoC-BoE Sovereign Default Database, Bank of Canada terms (free use with attribution). Units: current US dollars; total excludes domestic arrears. Methodology

Sovereign-debt crisis history

Each episode with the government debt-to-GDP ratio in its start year, where a reading exists. Episode dates use the same merge as the crisis atlas (consecutive crisis years bridged across gaps of up to two years).

  • 20132000 onward
    Debt at start: 107.5% (General govt (IMF GDD))episode →

Source: Global Macro Database 2026_06 (Müller, Xu, Lehbib & Chen 2025) | Reinhart-Rogoff via HBS BFFS | Laeven & Valencia (2020) Methodology

Restructuring history and creditor losses

No sovereign-debt restructuring on record for Cyprus in the Cruces–Trebesch haircut database (1815 to present).

Reading this profile

  • Debt levels mix perimeters. The headline and debt-at-start figures fall back through IMF general government, then central government, then WEO gross debt, then (before 1950) the GMD historical series.
  • Crisis flags end in 2016 (Reinhart-Rogoff) and 2017 (GMD, Laeven-Valencia), while debt runs to 2024. “Years since last crisis” and the absence of recent crises reflect where the sources stop, not a guarantee of calm.
  • Debt level is a weak predictor of default on its own; see the methodology for the debt-intolerance evidence and the full construction.