Military expenditure share of GDP
Military spending as a percentage of GDP: the economic burden of defence.
How it is measured
SIPRI-definition spending divided by nominal GDP.
Where the number came from
Expressing defence spending as a share of national output is what turns a budget line into a statement about priorities, and it became a formal political instrument in 2006 when NATO members adopted a guideline that each should spend at least two percent of GDP on defence, reaffirmed at the 2014 Wales summit with a decade to comply. That single threshold has since driven more national budget decisions than any other statistic in this collection, and it is worth knowing that the ratio was chosen because it is comparable and scale-free rather than because two percent corresponds to any particular military capability. The Factbook reported military expenditure in exactly this form and only in this form, which is why our ranked table of defence spending in dollars marks its archive-derived rows as computed: for entities with no live source, the dollar figure has to be reconstructed from the archived share and the archived GDP rather than read off directly.
Worked example: Germany 1.4 to 2.4 percent, read straight off the frozen archive
The best illustration of this indicator is a time series rather than a ranking, and the Factbook archive on this site carries one. Its final German entry reports military expenditure of 1.4 percent of GDP in 2021, 1.5 percent in 2022, 1.6 percent in 2023, 2.0 percent in 2024 and 2.4 percent as a 2025 estimate. That is a policy reversal visible as five numbers: a country that had sat below the NATO guideline for years crossing it and then continuing past it, following the invasion of Ukraine. Nothing in the dollar column shows this as cleanly, because German GDP was also moving. For scale at the extremes, our live 2024 figures put Ukraine at roughly 34.5 percent of GDP, Israel near 8.8 and the United States at about 3.4, with India around 2.3 and China about 1.7. Ukraine at 34.5 percent is not a country prioritising defence; it is a country whose entire economy has been reorganised around a war, and the ratio is rising partly because the denominator fell. At the other end, Ireland below a quarter of a percent is as much a statement about the distortions in Irish GDP described on the GDP per capita page as about Irish defence policy.
Figures read from our own military expenditure share of gdp table; each row there carries its observation year and whether it came from a live feed or the frozen archive.
Our data source
World Bank WDI (MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS).
Refresh cadence: Annual; taken on each rebuild.
What to watch for
A war economy can show a falling ratio if GDP collapses more slowly than spending rises. Compare with the absolute-dollar table. Because the denominator is GDP, anything that distorts a country’s GDP distorts this figure too, which is why economies with very large multinational sectors post implausibly low shares.
CIA World Factbook equivalent field: "Military expenditures" (frozen at the January 2026 final edition; our figures continue from live sources).