There's a problem with >= and >. FreeMarker interprets the > character as the closing character of the FTL tag. To prevent this, you can use lt instead of <, lte instead of <=, gt instead of > and gte instead of >=, like in <#if x gt y>. Another trick it to put the expression into parentheses like in <#if (x > y)>, although it's considered to be less elegant.