Military Spending Meaning: Definition & 2025 World Total

Military spending means the money a government spends on its armed forces and defense apparatus in a given year — personnel, equipment, operations, and research. In 2025, the 149 countries SIPRI tracks spent a combined $2,740.0bn on their militaries.

01 What Does "Military Spending" Mean?

Military spending — also called military or defense expenditure — is the total amount a national government allocates in a fiscal year to its armed forces and related defense functions. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the standard reference for this data, defines it broadly: it is not just weapons purchases, but the full cost of maintaining a country's capacity for organized defense, expressed in a common currency and price basis so spending can be compared across countries and years.

The figures used throughout this site are given in SIPRI constant 2024 US dollars, which strips out the effects of inflation and exchange-rate movement so that a dollar spent in 2010 and a dollar spent in 2025 represent the same real purchasing power.

02 World Military Spending in 2025: $2,740.0bn

Summing the 149 countries in SIPRI's 2025 dataset gives a world total of $2,740.0bn. This is not a projection or an estimate — 2025 is treated as an actual reporting year in the underlying data, not a forecast year.

That total is the sum across every one of the 149 countries in SIPRI's series. Each country's individual 2025 spending figure is available on the 2025 world rankings page, where it can be measured against this $2,740.0bn total.

03 What SIPRI Counts as Military Expenditure

Not every government cost that touches the armed forces counts. SIPRI's definition is built around a consistent set of categories, applied the same way across all 149 countries so the totals are comparable:

• Personnel — salaries and benefits for active-duty military and civilian defense staff, including military pensions.
• Operations and maintenance — the running costs of keeping forces, bases, and equipment functional.
• Procurement — purchases of weapons, vehicles, and other military equipment.
• Research and development — spending on developing new military technology and systems.
• Military construction — building and maintaining bases, facilities, and infrastructure used by the armed forces.

It excludes spending on domestic police, border guards not under military command, and veterans' benefits paid outside the military pension system — distinctions that matter because they keep the $2,740.0bn figure from double-counting spending that belongs to other parts of a government's budget.

04 How We Calculated the 2025 Total

The $2,740.0bn figure is our own calculation: we summed the constant-2024-USD military expenditure reported for each of the 149 countries in SIPRI's 2025 country-level data. SIPRI does not itself publish a single "world total" line for this figure — this site produces one by adding up its full country series.

05 Why This Total Is a Floor, Not the Whole World

$2,740.0bn covers every country SIPRI reports a figure for in 2025 — but that is not every country on Earth. Some governments do not publish military spending data at all, and SIPRI has no series to include for them.

In practice, this means the true global figure for 2025 is higher than $2,740.0bn, by an unknown amount tied to the countries missing from the count. Treat $2,740.0bn as the best available lower bound, not a claim of global completeness.

06 See the Full 2025 Country Rankings

The $2,740.0bn world total is built from 149 individual country figures. To see how any single country's military spending compares against that total, or against other countries, visit the 2025 world rankings. For definitions of related terms, see the Glossary.