General government consolidated gross debt
- Eurostat dataset
- gov_10dd_edpt1
- Reference period
- 2025
- Unit of measure
- % of GDP
Key estimates
- EU aggregate (2025): 81.7 % of GDP.
- Highest value: Greece at 146.1 % of GDP; lowest: Estonia at 24.1 % of GDP.
- Cross-country mean 65.2 % of GDP, standard deviation 32.8, coefficient of variation 50.3% across 27 reporting countries.
- Aggregate change 2014→2025: -11.5% on a constant panel of 27 countries.
How divergent are public debt positions in the Union? Eurostat dataset gov_10dd_edpt1 reports general government consolidated gross debt for 27 reporting countries, with 2025 as the most recent period carrying broad coverage. The European aggregate stands at 81.7 % of GDP. Debt ratios anchor the fiscal surveillance framework; their cross-sectional spread is far wider than the single 60% reference value suggests.
The five highest values in 2025 are recorded by Greece (146.1), Italy (137.1), France (115.6), Belgium (107.9), Spain (100.7), all expressed in % of GDP. At the opposite end of the distribution sit Estonia (24.1), Luxembourg (26.5), Denmark (27.9), Bulgaria (29.9), Ireland (32.9). The ratio between the highest and the lowest observation is 6.06, while the median country reports 59.3 % of GDP against a mean of 65.2 % of GDP.
Dispersion is wide: the standard deviation across countries is 32.8 % of GDP, giving a coefficient of variation of 50.3%. The mean sits above the median, which indicates that the distribution is pulled by the upper tail rather than being symmetric. Any European average quoted for this indicator therefore describes a synthetic country that few Member States resemble.
Between 2014 and 2025 the summed value across the 27 countries reporting in both periods moved by -11.5%. The largest relative increases are observed in Estonia (+107.8%), Romania (+51.7%), Finland (+36.6%); the largest decreases, or the smallest increases, in Ireland (-67.6%), Cyprus (-51.5%), Denmark (-42.7%). Because the panel is held constant, this change is not an artefact of countries entering or leaving the sample.
Lower values are the policy-preferred direction, so the top of the distribution identifies where the burden concentrates: bringing the highest observation down to the median would remove 86.8 % of GDP from the European total for that country alone. The estimates above are reproducible: the dataset identifier, filter dimensions and reference period are stated in the methodological note, and the series can be re-downloaded from the Eurostat dissemination API at any time.
Methodological note
Source: Eurostat, dataset gov_10dd_edpt1 ('Government deficit/surplus, debt and associated data'), extracted from the Eurostat dissemination API (JSON-stat 2.0) on the dataset update of 2026-04-22. Filter dimensions: unit=PC_GDP; na_item=GD; sector=S13. Unit of measure: % of GDP. Reference period: 2025. Geographic perimeter: national reporting units with two-character geo codes (27 countries with a non-missing observation); European and euro-area aggregates are excluded from the cross-country statistics and reported separately. Descriptive statistics (mean, median, population standard deviation, coefficient of variation) are computed unweighted over reporting countries. Change over time is computed on a constant panel: only countries with a non-missing observation in both the base and the reference period enter the calculation, which removes composition effects but may differ from the officially published aggregate. No imputation, seasonal adjustment or re-scaling has been applied beyond what Eurostat performs at source. Flagged provisional and estimated observations are retained as published.
Source data
The underlying series can be inspected and re-downloaded from the Eurostat data browser.