🇨🇭 Switzerland vs 🇪🇸 Spain

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. Spain currently owes about 4.7× as much as Switzerland — a gap of $1.58 trillion. Updated every second from each country's baseline figure; sources below.

🇨🇭
Switzerland
$432,635,452,572
Debt-to-GDP40%
Per citizen$47,417
Per second+$304
VS
🇪🇸
Spain
$2,013,114,521,529
Debt-to-GDP101%
Per citizen$40,311
Per second+$3,721
In nominal terms, Spain carries the larger government debt — roughly 4.7× that of Switzerland, a difference of $1.58 trillion. Debt-to-GDP (Switzerland: 40%, Spain: 101%) says more about the burden than the raw total does.

Among the 135 governments tracked here, Switzerland ranks 98th by debt-to-GDP and Spain 18th. Measured per person, Switzerland is 13th and Spain 19th.

Analysis

By total government debt, Switzerland ranks 25th and Spain 11th among the 135 sovereigns tracked on this site.

On a per-citizen basis the picture can look different from the nominal totals: a resident's notional share of the government debt in Switzerland is roughly 1.2× that in Spain ($47,417 vs $40,311 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Spain sits at 101% of GDP, well above Switzerland's 40%, meaning Spain owes far more relative to the size of its own economy — even where the nominal, dollar-for-dollar comparison above suggests otherwise.

The gap between them is widening: Spain's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($4K/sec vs $304/sec for Switzerland), adding roughly $295,228,800 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: Spain's population (50M) is about 5.5× Switzerland's (9M), which is part of why the nominal and per-capita comparisons above can point in different directions — a government's debt load scales loosely with the size of both its economy and its population, not either alone.

Switzerland and Spain are both grouped under this site's “Europe” region, so this is, in effect, an intra-regional comparison as well.

This analysis is generated automatically from live data as an educational orientation, not financial advice — see the methodology page for definitions and caveats.

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Source: Global Debt Clock, based on the IMF World Economic Outlook (October 2026, general government gross debt).
Live data: /api/compare?a=ch&b=es · Switzerland page · Spain page
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