🇳🇱 Netherlands vs 🇪🇸 Spain

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

Analysis

By total government debt, the Netherlands ranks 18th and Spain 11th 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.

The Netherlands and Spain 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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