🇬🇧 United Kingdom vs 🇩🇪 Germany

Analysis

By total government debt, United Kingdom ranks 4th-largest and Germany ranks 7th-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 United Kingdom is roughly 1.6× that in Germany ($63,640 vs $40,439 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: United Kingdom sits at 102% of GDP, well above Germany's 63%, meaning United Kingdom 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 narrowing: Germany's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($11K/sec vs $10K/sec for United Kingdom), closing the difference by roughly $68,947,200 per day. At that pace — and holding both growth rates constant, a simplification, since real-world rates shift with fiscal policy — the two would reach a similar total in a rough 36 years.

Scale is part of the story too: Germany's population (84M) is about 1.2× United Kingdom's (68M), 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.

United Kingdom and Germany 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.