Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. Germany currently owes about 12.4× more — a gap of $3.32 trillion. Updated every second from IMF baselines.
By total government debt, Portugal ranks 31st-largest and Germany ranks 6th-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 Germany is roughly 1.5× that in Portugal ($42,787 vs $28,162 per person).
The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Portugal sits at 90% of GDP, well above Germany's 65%, meaning Portugal 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 ($7K/sec vs $200/sec for Portugal), adding roughly $544,320,000 to the difference each day.
Scale is part of the story too: Germany's population (84M) is about 8.2× Portugal's (10M), 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.
Portugal 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.