Debt-to-Asset measures debt relative to a region's total assets, and it shows the steepest structural increase of the three indicators. Excluding the Kab. Waropen 2020 outlier, average leverage rose fairly steadily from 0.97% in 2013 to 2.85% in 2023, nearly tripling over the period. Growth was not perfectly linear: after climbing to around 2.1% by 2016, the ratio briefly eased back to 1.7%–1.8% between 2017 and 2019, before resuming its upward trajectory from 2020 onward, reaching 2.13% in 2020, 2.35% in 2021, 2.78% in 2022, and 2.86% in 2023. This post-2020 acceleration suggests regions leaned more heavily on debt financing relative to their asset base during and after the pandemic, consistent with the broader borrowing trend seen in the other two ratios. Dispersion also widened over time, with the standard deviation growing from 1.5 in 2013 to 3.7 by 2022–2023, pointing to a small but growing group of regions carrying disproportionately high debt loads relative to assets, even as the median region's leverage remains comparatively modest at 1.36% in 2023.

During the 2013–2019 period, the ratio remained relatively stable, fluctuating within a narrow range of 0.97% to 1.78%, suggesting a largely stable asset financing structure among Indonesian local governments. However, a notable acceleration occurred between 2020 and 2022, when the ratio increased from 1.76% to 2.78% within just two years. This rate of increase had not been observed in any previous period covered by the dataset. The pattern suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic served as a structural inflection point, prompting a systematic shift in the composition of local government asset financing toward greater reliance on liabilities. Furthermore, the maximum observed ratio of 49.66% indicates that certain local governments exhibited a substantial dependence on debt-based financing sources. Such a high level of leverage implies that nearly half of the asset base was financed through liabilities, highlighting considerable variation in financing strategies and fiscal conditions across local governments.