World Clock / Germany / vs Switzerland

🇩🇪 Germany vs 🇨🇭 Switzerland

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. Germany currently owes about 8.0× as much as Switzerland — a gap of $3.04 trillion. Updated every second from each country's baseline figure; sources below.

🇩🇪
Germany
$3,469,249,158,691
Debt-to-GDP63%
Per citizen$41,659
Per second+$10,367
VS
🇨🇭
Switzerland
$432,635,436,381
Debt-to-GDP40%
Per citizen$47,417
Per second+$304
In nominal terms, Germany carries the larger government debt — roughly 8.0× that of Switzerland, a difference of $3.04 trillion. Debt-to-GDP (Germany: 63%, Switzerland: 40%) says more about the burden than the raw total does.

Among the 135 governments tracked here, Germany ranks 52nd by debt-to-GDP and Switzerland 98th. Measured per person, Germany is 18th and Switzerland 13th.

Analysis

By total government debt, Germany ranks 7th and Switzerland 25th 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 1.1× that in Germany ($47,417 vs $41,659 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Germany sits at 63% of GDP, well above Switzerland's 40%, meaning Germany 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: Germany's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($10K/sec vs $304/sec for Switzerland), adding roughly $869,443,200 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: Germany's population (83M) is about 9.1× 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.

Germany and Switzerland 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=de&b=ch · Germany page · Switzerland page
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