Wehretat Definition: Meaning & Global Total 2025
"Wehretat" is German for defense budget or military expenditure, and in 2025 the 149 countries SIPRI tracks spent a combined $2,740.0bn.
Das Wichtigste
- "Wehretat" is German for defense budget — the funds a government allocates annually to its armed forces.
- In 2025, the 149 countries SIPRI tracks spent a combined $2,740.0bn.
- This $2,740.0bn is our own calculation from SIPRI country-level data, not a SIPRI-published total.
- Coverage gaps (e.g. North Korea has no series) mean the true global figure is higher than $2,740.0bn.
- Related German terms — Verteidigungshaushalt, Militärausgaben — are near-synonyms for the same concept.
Fazit
"Wehretat" is the German term for a national defense budget, and in 2025 the 149 countries SIPRI tracks spent a combined $2,740.0bn — our calculation from SIPRI country-level data, not a SIPRI-published total. Because some states (like North Korea) are absent from the dataset, this figure is a floor on true global military spending, not a complete count.
Auf einen Blick
| Term | WehretatGerman for "defense budget" |
|---|---|
| Year | 2025 |
| World total | $2,740.0bnour calculation, not a SIPRI-published total; a floor due to coverage gaps |
| Countries included | 149 |
| Data status | Actual, not an estimate |
"Wehretat" is the German word for a state's defense budget — the sum of money a government sets aside each year for its armed forces. In 2025, the 149 countries SIPRI tracks together spent $2,740.0bn (our calculation from SIPRI country-level data; a floor, not a complete count — see coverage note below), the scale against which any single country's Wehretat can be measured.
01 Was bedeutet „Wehretat"? (Definition)
"Wehretat" combines Wehr (defense) and Etat (budget) into a single compound noun. It refers specifically to the portion of a national budget allocated to military purposes: personnel pay, equipment procurement, research and development, operations, and infrastructure for the armed forces. It is a domestic-policy and legislative term — the Wehretat is what a parliament or ministry of finance approves for the defense ministry each fiscal year.
The term is not tied to any single accounting standard. Different countries define what counts inside their Wehretat differently — some include paramilitary forces or veterans' pensions, others do not — which is one reason cross-country comparisons rely on standardized datasets like SIPRI's rather than each government's self-reported figure.
02 Wehretat vs. Verteidigungshaushalt und Militärausgaben
- Wehretat — the everyday, slightly older German term for the defense budget line item itself, as approved in national budget legislation.
- Verteidigungshaushalt — a near-synonym, more common in formal government and ministry documents; "Haushalt" is the standard German word for "budget."
- Militärausgaben — "military expenditure," the broader, internationally comparable concept used in statistics and reporting. This is the term that maps directly onto SIPRI's dataset, which is why it is the basis for the figures below.
In practice, the three terms are used almost interchangeably in German media and policy discussion, and all three translate to "military spending" or "defense budget" in English.
03 Der weltweite Gesamtwert 2025: $2,740.0bn
To give the term concrete scale, we sum the 2025 military expenditure of every country SIPRI reports. The result: $2,740.0bn, aggregated across 149 countries, in SIPRI constant 2024 US dollars. (Coverage caveat: a floor figure, not a complete picture — see below.)
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Year | 2025 |
| World total military expenditure | $2,740.0bn |
| Countries included | 149 |
Note: covers 149 countries with SIPRI series; gaps (e.g. North Korea) mean the true world total is somewhat higher.
This figure is our calculation from SIPRI country-level data, not a total SIPRI itself publishes. It gives a single Wehretat — say, a national defense budget quoted in the news — a denominator: any country's figure can be expressed as a share of this $2,740.0bn world total.
04 Wie die Summe berechnet wird – und ihre Grenzen
The $2,740.0bn figure is a straight sum of the 149 individual country series SIPRI reports for 2025, converted to constant 2024 US dollars so that spending across years and currencies is comparable. It is not an estimate produced by SIPRI's own published world-total series; it is our own aggregation of their country-level rows.
Coverage caveat: North Korea has no SIPRI series at all, and several other states have gaps in their reported years, so this total is a floor, not a complete picture of global military spending. The true global figure is higher than $2,740.0bn.
2025 is a reported year in the SIPRI dataset, not a projection — unlike 2026 or 2027 figures elsewhere on this site, which are estimates and should be read as such.
05 Wehretat im Vergleich: weiter zu den Rankings
Once you know what "Wehretat" means and have the $2,740.0bn world total as a reference point, the natural next question is how individual countries compare. The 2025 world rankings break the same SIPRI dataset down by country, so any single nation's Wehretat can be read as a share of the 149-country total above.
For definitions of adjacent terms — GDP share of military spending, per-capita spending, real vs. nominal figures — see the broader Glossary.
Häufig gestellte Fragen
- What does "Wehretat" mean?
- "Wehretat" is German for a state's defense budget — the money a government allocates each year to its armed forces, covering personnel, equipment, operations, and infrastructure.
- What is the global military spending total for 2025?
- The 149 countries SIPRI reports for 2025 spent a combined $2,740.0bn, based on our calculation from SIPRI country-level data.
- Is "Wehretat" the same as "Militärausgaben"?
- They refer to the same underlying concept — defense spending — though "Militärausgaben" (military expenditure) is the term used in international statistics like SIPRI's, while "Wehretat" and "Verteidigungshaushalt" are the German budgetary terms.
- Does the $2,740.0bn figure cover every country in the world?
- No. It sums the 149 countries SIPRI reports for 2025; some spenders, including North Korea, have no SIPRI series, so the actual global total is higher.
defensebudget.org
Daten zu Militärausgaben, Quelle SIPRI
defensebudget.org erfasst die Militärausgaben von 160 Ländern auf Basis der SIPRI Military Expenditure Database. Die Seiten werden aus diesem Datensatz erzeugt und vor der Veröffentlichung geprüft.