Germany Has the EU's Biggest Trade Surplus in Goods With Non-EU Countries

A surplus made in one country

In 2025 the 27 Member States exported 106.2 billion euro more in goods to the rest of the world than they imported from it. That is the Union's goods surplus, and it is a modest figure next to the balances of the countries that make it up.

Germany alone recorded a surplus of 215.9 billion euro with non-EU countries. That is 2.0 times the EU total: the other twenty-six Member States together ran a deficit of 109.7 billion euro with the rest of the world, and Germany's surplus paid for it with room to spare. Both figures are derived here from the published balances.

Ireland follows at 88.5 billion euro and Italy at 50.5 billion. Those three surpluses sum to 354.9 billion, more than three times the Union's net position. Sweden at 25.3 billion, France at 22.0 billion, Denmark at 20.2 billion, Austria at 16.6 billion and Finland at 11.0 billion complete the list of substantial surpluses; Slovakia at 3.2 billion, Latvia at 2.3 billion and Estonia at 0.7 billion are the remaining three. Eleven Member States were in surplus with the rest of the world.

Sixteen in deficit

The Netherlands recorded a deficit of 175.2 billion euro, by far the largest in the Union, and Spain 51.9 billion. Belgium at 33.7 billion, Poland at 27.4 billion and Greece at 15.7 billion follow. Czechia, Romania and Bulgaria are each between 7 and 10 billion in deficit, and the remaining eight deficits are below 5 billion euro each.

Summed, the eleven surpluses come to 456.1 billion euro and the sixteen deficits to 349.9 billion. The Union's headline figure is the difference between two much larger numbers.

The port effect

The Dutch and Belgian figures need reading with care, and Eurostat's own methodology explains why. Extra-EU trade is recorded by the Member State where goods clear customs. A container from Shanghai unloaded at Rotterdam and driven on to a warehouse in Germany counts as a Dutch import from China, and then as an intra-EU shipment from the Netherlands to Germany. The goods never belonged to a Dutch buyer, but the extra-EU deficit lands in the Dutch accounts.

The Netherlands and Belgium hold the Union's two largest seaports, and together they record a deficit of 208.9 billion euro with the rest of the world. Some part of that is Dutch and Belgian consumption; some part is Europe's imports passing through. The statistics do not separate the two, and neither does this study.

The mirror of that effect is that Germany's own surplus is understated, since some of its imports from outside the Union arrive in the accounts as intra-EU purchases from the Netherlands. The country-by-country balances are exact as records of where goods were declared; as records of who consumes what, they are approximations.

What the Union sells and what it buys

The composition of the surplus is a different story from its geography. Across all 27 Member States, the EU ran a surplus of 254.0 billion euro in chemicals and related products, which includes pharmaceuticals, and of 173.4 billion in machinery and transport equipment. Food, drink and tobacco added 39.3 billion and unclassified commodities 21.1 billion.

Against that stand deficits of 299.6 billion euro in mineral fuels, 52.7 billion in other manufactured goods and 29.4 billion in raw materials. The fuel deficit alone absorbs 70.1% of the combined chemicals and machinery surplus, a share derived here from the published figures.

Read together, the two rankings say the same thing twice. The Union earns its surplus by selling medicines, machines and vehicles, most of them from a few Member States, and spends most of it on the fuel it does not produce.