🇬🇧 United Kingdom vs 🇩🇪 Germany

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. The United Kingdom currently owes about 1.2× as much as Germany — a gap of $833.6 billion. Updated every second from each country's baseline figure; sources below.

Among the 135 governments tracked here, the United Kingdom ranks 17th by debt-to-GDP and Germany 52nd. Measured per person, the United Kingdom is 7th and Germany 18th.

Analysis

By total government debt, the United Kingdom ranks 4th and Germany 7th 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 the United Kingdom is roughly 1.5× that in Germany ($61,601 vs $41,659 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: the United Kingdom sits at 102% of GDP, well above Germany's 63%, meaning the 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 ($10K/sec vs $8K/sec for the United Kingdom), closing the difference by roughly $189,216,000 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 roughly 12 years.

Scale is part of the story too: Germany's population (83M) is about 1.2× the United Kingdom's (70M), 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.

The 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.

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