World Clock / Spain / vs South Korea

🇪🇸 Spain vs 🇰🇷 South Korea

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. Spain currently owes about 1.9× as much as South Korea — a gap of $965.7 billion. Updated every second from each country's baseline figure; sources below.

🇪🇸
Spain
$2,013,114,503,802
Debt-to-GDP101%
Per citizen$40,311
Per second+$3,721
VS
🇰🇷
South Korea
$1,047,442,865,272
Debt-to-GDP52%
Per citizen$20,294
Per second+$2,400
In nominal terms, Spain carries the larger government debt — roughly 1.9× that of South Korea, a difference of $965.7 billion. Debt-to-GDP (Spain: 101%, South Korea: 52%) says more about the burden than the raw total does.

Among the 135 governments tracked here, Spain ranks 18th by debt-to-GDP and South Korea 76th. Measured per person, Spain is 19th and South Korea 34th.

Analysis

By total government debt, Spain ranks 11th and South Korea 15th 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 Spain is roughly 2.0× that in South Korea ($40,311 vs $20,294 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Spain sits at 101% of GDP, well above South Korea's 52%, 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 $2K/sec for South Korea), adding roughly $114,134,400 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: South Korea's population (52M) is about 1.0× Spain's (50M), 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.

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=es&b=kr · Spain page · South Korea page
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