🇪🇸 Spain vs 🇳🇱 Netherlands

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. Spain currently owes about 3.2× as much as the Netherlands — a gap of $1.38 trillion. Updated every second from each country's baseline figure; sources below.

Among the 135 governments tracked here, Spain ranks 18th by debt-to-GDP and the Netherlands 89th. Measured per person, Spain is 19th and the Netherlands 22nd.

Analysis

By total government debt, Spain ranks 11th 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 Spain is roughly 1.1× that in the Netherlands ($40,311 vs $35,077 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Spain sits at 101% of GDP, well above the Netherlands' 45%, 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 the Netherlands), adding roughly $169,776,000 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: Spain's population (50M) is about 2.8× the Netherlands' (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 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.

More Spain comparisons