What Is Military Expenditure? Definition & 2025 Total

Military expenditure is the total amount a country spends in a year on its armed forces — pay and pensions for military personnel, weapons and equipment, research and development, and military construction, among other categories. Summing SIPRI's country-level data for 2025 across the 149 countries it reports puts the world total at $2,740.0bn.

01 What does "military expenditure" mean?

Military expenditure is a statistical category, not a single line item in a government's budget. It's built by adding up everything a country spends to run and equip its armed forces in one year: salaries and pensions for soldiers, purchases of weapons and hardware, research and development for defense technology, construction of military facilities, and the operating costs of defense ministries. It does not track any single "defense budget" line, because countries organize their own budgets differently — some fold military pensions into a general pension system, others keep them inside the defense ministry.

SIPRI's methodology is the reference standard used across this site: it standardizes each country's reported spending against a common definition, converts it into constant 2024 US dollars to strip out inflation and exchange-rate noise, and publishes a comparable time series that runs from 1949 to the present.

02 What SIPRI counts as military expenditure

SIPRI's definition is deliberately broad — wider than what many countries label their "defense budget" — so that figures are comparable across states with different accounting conventions.

• Personnel — active and reserve forces' pay, allowances, and military pensions.
• Operations and maintenance — running costs for equipment, bases, and units.
• Procurement — purchases of weapons, vehicles, and other military hardware.
• Research and development — spending on military-specific R&D programs.
• Military construction — building and maintaining defense infrastructure.
• Paramilitary forces — included only when trained and equipped for military operations.

Excluded, where identifiable, are civil defense, veterans' benefits paid outside the military pension system, and spending on police or other domestic security forces not organized along military lines.

03 The 2025 world total: $2,740.0bn

Applying that definition to every country SIPRI reports for 2025 and adding the results together gives a world total of $2,740.0bn, expressed in constant 2024 US dollars.

04 Why this figure is a floor, not the whole world

Because the $2,740.0bn total is a sum of reported country data, it can only include countries that SIPRI actually reports a series for. Some states spend on their armed forces but are absent from the dataset entirely or have gaps in specific years, so their spending isn't reflected in the total at all.

Treat the figure as the best available lower bound on global military expenditure for 2025, not as a claim that every country on Earth is accounted for.

05 How military expenditure is measured, and related terms

All figures on this site are expressed in constant 2024 US dollars, which removes the effects of inflation and exchange-rate movements so that spending can be compared across years and across countries on a like-for-like basis. Figures for years 2026 and 2027, where they appear elsewhere on this site, are SIPRI estimates and should be read as projections rather than actual outturns; the 2025 figure used here is an actual reported figure, not an estimate.

To see how individual countries compare on this metric, use the 2025 world rankings. For definitions of related terms such as "share of GDP" or "arms transfers," see the glossary.