What Is Military Spending? Definition & 2025 Total

Military spending is the money a government allocates to its armed forces and defense establishment in a given year — and in 2025, the world total across the 149 countries SIPRI tracks was $2,740.0bn, calculated from SIPRI's country-level data.

01 What Is Military Spending? A Working Definition

Military spending (also called defense spending or military expenditure) is government expenditure on a country's armed forces and related activities — active-duty and reserve personnel, weapons procurement, military research and development, operations and maintenance, and in most methodologies, military pensions. It excludes most spending on domestic police, border agencies not under military command, and general emergency services, though the exact boundary shifts depending on which country is reporting and which organization is compiling the figures.

SIPRI (the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) is the most widely cited independent source for this data, publishing annual, standardized estimates in constant prices so spending can be compared across countries and over time without inflation or exchange-rate distortion.

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

Summing SIPRI's 2025 country-level figures gives a world total of $2,740.0bn, drawn from the 149 countries in SIPRI's dataset for that year. This is not a figure SIPRI itself publishes as a single line — it's our calculation from SIPRI country-level data, built by adding every country SIPRI reports for 2025.

Data as of July 7, 2026.

Figures are expressed in constant 2024 US dollars, which strips out inflation and lets year-on-year comparisons reflect real changes in spending rather than currency effects. For a country-by-country breakdown of who contributes most to this total, see the 2025 world rankings.

03 What Counts (and What Doesn't) in the Official Figures

SIPRI's definition of military expenditure is deliberately broad, aiming to capture the full resource cost of a country's armed forces rather than just its formal "defense ministry" budget line. That typically includes:

• Personnel — salaries and benefits for military and civilian defense-ministry staff, plus pensions for retired military personnel.
• Operations and maintenance — day-to-day running costs, training, and upkeep of equipment and bases.
• Procurement — purchases of weapons, vehicles, and other military hardware.
• Research and development — spending on military-specific R&D programs.
• Paramilitary forces — included only when judged to be trained and equipped for military operations.

Excluded, in general, are civil defense, spending on veterans after they've left the pension system, and most police and internal-security spending — though individual governments classify budgets differently, which is exactly why a standardized source like SIPRI matters for comparison.

04 Why No Total Is Perfectly Complete

The $2,740.0bn figure is best understood as a floor rather than a ceiling. SIPRI does not maintain a continuous spending series for every state — North Korea is the clearest example of a country with no published series at all, and a number of smaller or less transparent states have gaps in individual years. When a country is missing from the dataset, its spending is simply absent from the sum rather than estimated, which means the true global total is higher than $2,740.0bn, by an unknown but likely modest margin relative to the overall figure.

This is a standard limitation of any global military-spending estimate, not a flaw unique to this calculation: no organization — SIPRI included — claims full coverage of every government's military budget.

05 How Military Spending Is Measured and Compared Across Countries

Comparing military spending across countries requires two adjustments. First, figures are converted to a common currency — usually US dollars — using market or purchasing-power exchange rates. Second, they're expressed in constant prices for a fixed base year (2024, in this dataset) so that inflation in any one country doesn't distort the comparison over time.

Analysts also commonly express spending as a share of GDP, since a country's economic size shapes how much military spending it can sustain. A share-of-world-total figure tells you about relative scale among reported spenders, while a share-of-GDP figure tells you about domestic economic burden; the two can point in very different directions for the same country. See the 2025 world rankings for each country's individual share of the $2,740.0bn total.

For the individual country figures behind the 2025 world total, and to see how each spender ranks, visit the 2025 world rankings. For definitions of related terms, browse the glossary.