CdM | At the end of the first quarter, public administration debt stood at €1.668 trillion, representing 103.5% of GDP, according to data from the Excessive Deficit Protocol (PDE) published by the Bank of Spain.
This is 2.8 percentage points less than in the same period in 2024, while the growth rate of the debt balance was 3.3% year-on-year.
Among the various subsectors of the public administration, the debt balance of the central government as a whole rose to €1.533 trillion in March, representing 95.1% of GDP. The year-on-year growth of this subsector’s debt in the first quarter was 3.9%.
As regards regional governments, the debt of the autonomous communities grew to €338 billion in March, 21% of GDP, with a year-on-year increase of 2.8%, while the debt of local authorities stood at €23 billion, representing 1.4% of GDP and 1.3% less than the balance recorded a year earlier.
For its part, the Social Security debt balance stood at €126 billion, 7.8% of GDP, with year-on-year growth of 8.6%.
In terms of the evolution of debt by instrument and maturity, debt in long-term securities grew by 3.9% year-on-year, while loans with a maturity of over one year fell by 4.6% compared to March 2024. Meanwhile, the year-on-year rate of change in short-term instruments in the first quarter of 2025 showed an increase of 9.3%.
Looking at the distribution of the balance according to this breakdown of instruments, in March 2025, debt was mainly in the form of long-term liabilities, accounting for 94.7% of the total, with long-term securities accounting for a particularly significant 85.2%, while short-term debt accounted for 5.3%.
