Never had a tenth of a percentage point meant so much. Spain's public debt fell below the 100% of gross domestic product (GDP) threshold last July for the first time since the pandemic. The figure, published on Thursday by the Bank of Spain, places the liabilities of all public administrations at exactly 99.9% of GDP. That is one tenth of a point below the equivalent of all the wealth the country generates in a year, a symbolic level not recorded in Spain since February 2020, the month before the health crisis plunged the economy into crisis. The ratio represents a correction of 2.4 percentage points compared to the same month in 2025 and 1.6 points compared to June of this year.
Crossing that threshold does not mean, however, that Spain has reduced its accumulated debt in absolute terms — that is, in hard cash. On the contrary, the balance reached 1.744 trillion euros in July, 3.8% more than a year earlier, though around one point less than in the previous month. In other words, what has decreased is the weight of that debt relative to the size of the economy, a ratio that serves as a benchmark for measuring a country's level of indebtedness, as it allows the accumulated liabilities to be put in relation to economic capacity and enables comparisons over time.
In any case, the level of 99.9% of GDP represents a snapshot of the situation in July. The ratio may move back above or below that level in coming months, as both the volume of debt and the GDP used to calculate it are continuously evolving.
The data provided by the banking supervisor shows that the central government accounts for the bulk of public debt. Its balance stood at 1.589 trillion euros, equivalent to 91% of GDP, after growing 4.2% year-on-year. The autonomous communities, for their part, had accumulated 349 billion euros, equivalent to 20% of GDP. The Social Security deficit stood at 136 billion euros, or 7.8% of GDP, and that of local corporations was around 22 billion euros, or 1.2%.
These percentages cannot be added together directly to obtain total public debt. The reason is that part of the debt held by some administrations is in the hands of others. If the central government, for example, lends money to a regional government, that loan appears as an asset for the central government and as a debt for the region. When calculating the liabilities of all administrations combined, these positions are consolidated and eliminated to avoid counting the same amount twice.
The evolution over the past year has been uneven across the different levels of government. Central government debt rose 4.2% compared to July 2025, while that of the autonomous communities grew at a slower pace of 2.7%. Social Security, meanwhile, recorded an increase of 7.9%. Local corporations, by contrast, reduced their obligations by 7.9%, and other central government units did so by 10.5%.
