Question 3
How much does the interest cost?
In 2025, public administrations paid €66.6 billion in interest on their debt, 2.2 times as much as in 2020 (€29.7 billion).
Interest paid since you opened this page
0 €
2025 average, about €2,112 a second.
The bill
Flat for years, then ×2.2 in 5 years
The debt grew a lot after 1995, but the interest bill stayed flat for a long time: rates were falling. Since 2020, rates have been rising again, and the bill with them.
What does that compare to?
More than the defence budget
In 2024, interest on the debt cost more than defence, police and the courts, sport and culture and the environment. Of these items, only education cost more.
- Education148.6 € billion
- Interest on the debt58.9 € billion
- Defence54.2 € billion
- Police, courts, fire services52.1 € billion
- Sport and culture43.1 € billion
- Environment30.3 € billion
The price of money
What rate does France borrow at?
The interest rate is the price France pays to borrow: at 4%, borrowing €100 costs €4 a year. That price depends on lenders’ confidence. Here is the rate each country borrows at over 10 years.
In August 2026, of these countries, France paid the most to borrow over 10 years: 4.00%, more than Italy, Greece, Belgium, Spain, Portugal and Germany. The gap with Germany, the euro area’s benchmark, is 0.82 percentage points.
Why the bill will keep rising
The debt is renewed at today’s price
In 2025, France paid 2.0% on average on its debt, while it now borrows at around 4.0%. Every year, old loans fall due: they are repaid by borrowing again, at the going rate.
Each box: a 10-year loan, at the average rate of its year.
Average of these 10 loans–
Simplified illustration: the real debt mixes different maturities and amounts. But the principle is the same.
The snowball effect
When interest makes the debt grow on its own
If the rate paid on the debt is higher than the economy’s growth, the debt grows faster than the wealth produced, even without new spending. That is the “snowball effect”.
Today the average rate paid is already slightly above growth: the snowball is starting to roll. But that average rate is rising as the debt is renewed, and France also runs a deficit excluding interest: even with no interest at all to pay, it would still borrow 2.9% of GDP.