🇳🇱 Netherlands vs 🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. The Netherlands currently owes about 1.4× as much as Saudi Arabia — a gap of $173.6 billion. 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 Saudi Arabia 115th. Measured per person, the Netherlands is 22nd and Saudi Arabia 47th.

Analysis

By total government debt, the Netherlands ranks 18th and Saudi Arabia 24th 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 Netherlands is roughly 2.8× that in Saudi Arabia ($35,077 vs $12,589 per person).

Both sit below 60% of GDP, the EU's Maastricht reference value — the Netherlands at 45% and Saudi Arabia at 32%. A low ratio is not on its own a sign of strength: some governments borrow little because lenders will not lend to them.

The gap between them is narrowing: Saudi Arabia's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($2K/sec vs $2K/sec for the Netherlands), closing the difference by roughly $42,681,600 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 11 years.

Scale is part of the story too: Saudi Arabia's population (37M) is about 2.0× 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.

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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