🇨🇭 Switzerland vs 🇳🇱 Netherlands

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. The Netherlands currently owes about 1.5× as much as Switzerland — a gap of $203.3 billion. Updated every second from each country's baseline figure; sources below.

Among the 135 governments tracked here, Switzerland ranks 98th by debt-to-GDP and the Netherlands 89th. Measured per person, Switzerland is 13th and the Netherlands 22nd.

Analysis

By total government debt, Switzerland ranks 25th and the Netherlands 18th 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 1.4× that in the Netherlands ($47,417 vs $35,077 per person).

Both sit below 60% of GDP, the EU's Maastricht reference value — Switzerland at 40% and the Netherlands at 45%. A low ratio is not on its own a sign of strength: some governments borrow little because lenders will not lend to them.

The gap between them is widening: the Netherlands' debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($2K/sec vs $304/sec for Switzerland), adding roughly $125,452,800 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: the Netherlands' population (18M) is about 2.0× 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 the Netherlands 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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