Spain's public debt, rising unchecked for the past five years of economic crisis, will peak at just over 101 per cent of output in 2015, the government says.
The country's ratio of debt to gross domestic product (GDP) will hit 101.13 per cent in 2015 before easing to 101.09 per cent in 2016, according to government documents sent to the European Commission that were published on Thursday.
The government's budget for 2014, which was tabled last month, forecasts the debt ratio will rise to 98.86 per cent next year from an expected 94.2 per cent at the end of 2013.
Under the terms of the European Union's Maastricht Treaty, member states are supposed to have public deficits of no more than three per cent of GDP, and debt of no more than 60 per cent.
Spain's debt ratio has soared from 40.2 per cent of GDP in 2008 - when the end of a decade-long property boom triggered an economic slump - to 85.9 per cent at the end of 2012.
Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's conservative government, which has imposed several rounds of austerity to fix the state's accounts, predicts the deficit will fall to 4.2 per cent of GDP in 2015 and down to 2.8 per cent in 2016, according to the documents.
Madrid had already announced that it expects the deficit will end 2013 at 6.5 per cent of GDP and fall to 5.8 per cent of output in 2014.
The government forecasts that the Spanish economy, the euro zone's fourth biggest, has emerged this quarter from recession and will post growth of 0.7 per cent next year.
It forecasts the economy will shrink by 1.3 per cent overall this year.
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