🇮🇸 Iceland vs 🇩🇪 Germany

Analysis

By total government debt, Iceland ranks 100th-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 Iceland is roughly 1.5× that in Germany ($61,958 vs $40,503 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Germany sits at 63% of GDP, well above Iceland's 56%, meaning Germany 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: Germany's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($11K/sec vs $58/sec for Iceland), adding roughly $943,056,000 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: Germany's population (84M) is about 228.1× Iceland's (0M), 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.

Iceland 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.