The EU writes two numbers into its own treaties — debt under 60% of GDP, deficit under 3%. On its 2024 books, 16 of 27 members breach at least one, and only 11 clear both

The European Union writes two numbers into its own treaties as the outer edge of a sound government budget: debt no higher than 60% of GDP, and a deficit no wider than 3%. They are the reference values of the Stability and Growth Pact, fixed at Maastricht three decades ago and carried into Article 126 of the bloc's governing treaty. We pulled Eurostat's own excessive-deficit-procedure dataset — the figures the European Commission uses to police those limits — updated 22 April 2026, and kept every 2024 value for all 27 member states. Sixteen breach at least one line. Only 11 clear both. Twelve carry debt above 60% of GDP: Greece highest at 154.2%, then Italy 134.7%, France 112.6%, Belgium 103.9% and Spain 101.6%; Germany (62.2%) and Cyprus (62.7%) sit just over. Eleven ran deficits wider than 3%: Romania widest at 9.3%, then Poland 6.4%, France 5.8%, Slovakia 5.3% and Hungary 5.1%. The EU27 as a single economy breaches both — 80.7% debt on a 3.1% deficit.

The following is analysis, not fact. Read the two lists side by side and they only partly overlap. Twelve countries are over on debt, 11 over on deficit, but only seven are over on both — five breach the debt line alone, four the deficit alone. The two halves of the same rulebook catch overlapping but noticeably different sets. Greece is the tell. It carries the bloc's largest debt pile, 154.2% of GDP — two and a half times the ceiling, the face of the last euro crisis — and in 2024 it ran a budget surplus of 1.3%. Cyprus, also above the debt line at 62.7%, posted a 4.1% surplus; Portugal, at 93.5%, a 0.6% surplus. At the other end, the widest deficit breachers, Romania and Poland, each carry debt of 54.8% — comfortably under the 60% ceiling. A country can be buried in accumulated debt yet balancing its books this year, or lightly indebted yet borrowing heavily. The debt ceiling measures a stock built over decades; the deficit limit measures a single year's flow. In 2024 they pulled apart — which is why a rule-by-rule read names one set of countries, and the bloc-wide aggregate hides all of it.

Exceeding a reference value is not the same as breaking the law. The Stability and Growth Pact, reformed in 2024, judges compliance on a multi-year net-expenditure path and lets debt above 60% pass if it is 'sufficiently diminishing' toward the value. The bloc's actual enforcement tool, the excessive deficit procedure, covered eight states in 2024 — the seven the Council named that July (Belgium, France, Italy, Hungary, Malta, Poland, Slovakia) plus Romania, under procedure since 2020. That list turns on the deficit, not the debt ceiling, and omits some breachers on these numbers: Spain, Austria and Finland each ran deficits above 3% in 2024 yet were not among the seven states placed under procedure that July. A raw breach and a formal finding of an excessive deficit are different things — and a ratio can also climb simply because GDP fell.

**View from Brussels.** The Commission would say these numbers were never meant as automatic pass-fail switches. A country above 60% on a Council-agreed correction path is treated differently from one simply ignoring the line; the reformed pact weighs the medium-term trajectory, not a single year's snapshot. On that framing, France at 112% inside an agreed path is a managed case, not a violation. It is the institution's own reading of its rules — a lens on the ledger, not a verdict these figures hand down.