The go-to source for comparing national levels of defense spending arount the world is SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which has just published its data on defense spending in 2025. Here are a few snapshots from “Trends in World Military Expenditure, 2025,” co-authored by Xiao Liang, Nan Tian, Diego Lopes da Silva, Lorenzo Scarazzato, Zubaida A. Karim, and Jade Guiberteau Ricard (April 2026).
This figure shows the inflation-adjusted level of defense spending for the world going back to 1988. The decline after the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the rise in the “Asia and Oceania” share as China’s economy and defense spending have grown, and the rise in European defense spending in the last few years are all visible. Moreover, the “Americas” defense spending–dominated by US spending–has been fairly flat since about 2010, so the growth in defense spending is happening in other regions of the world.
It’s interesting (to me, at least) that the growth rate of defense spending over this time has been slower than the growth of the world economy more broadly. As a rough average, world GDP has been growing at 3.5% annually in recent decades. As compounded growth rates take place, the world economy has grown by about 180% in the last 30 years. If you look back at the trough of defense spending in the mid-1990s at about $1.2 trillion, it has risen by “only” about 120% during that time. Thus, the share of world GDP going to defense spending has been falling.
The US continues to have by far the largest level of defense spending of any country, accounting for about one-third of the total.
Finally, for fans of large tables, here’s a list of the countries of the world ranked by total spending on national defense. You can pick out the data-points that interest you the most. (Numbers in brackets mean that the totals were estimated by SIPRI based on government sources.) For example, the total rise in US defense spending from 2016 to 202 was 11%, compared with a rise of 62% for China, 96% for Russia, 118% for Germany, and 39% for India.
Or in the column on defense spending as a share of national GDP, it’s heartbreaking to see that Ukraine’s share was 3.7% in 2016 and 40% in 2025, even as Russia’s defense spending as a share of GDP has risen from 5.4% in 2016 to 7.5% in 2025. However, the percentage of GDP going to military spending hasn’t changed much for the US, China, or India; to put it another way, the large increases in China’s defense spending in the last decade or so are a reflection of the large increases in the size of China’s overall economy.
