🇪🇸 Spain vs 🇳🇱 Netherlands

Analysis

By total government debt, Spain ranks 11th-largest and Netherlands ranks 19th-largest among the 137 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 national debt in Spain is roughly 1.2× that in Netherlands ($42,368 vs $34,641 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Spain sits at 100% of GDP, well above Netherlands's 43%, 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 Netherlands), adding roughly $215,222,400 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: Spain's population (47M) is about 2.6× Netherlands's (18M), 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.

Spain and 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.