Military expenditure
Total military spending in current US dollars, including personnel, operations, procurement, and military R&D.
How it is measured
SIPRI-definition military expenditure as republished by the World Bank: broader than narrow defence-ministry budgets.
Where the number came from
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute was founded in 1966 with a Swedish parliamentary grant marking 150 years of unbroken peace, and its military expenditure database is the reason cross-country defence comparison is possible at all. Governments do not publish comparable defence budgets: they differ over whether to include military pensions, paramilitary forces, space programmes, nuclear weapons research housed in energy ministries, and off-budget procurement. SIPRI imposes a single definition, close to the NATO one, and reconstructs national figures to fit it, which is why a SIPRI number for a country frequently differs from what that country’s own defence ministry announces. The World Bank republishes the SIPRI series, which is what reaches this site. Where a country is genuinely opaque, SIPRI estimates or declines to publish, and declining to publish is itself information.
Worked example: what a dollar buys is not the same everywhere
Our 2024 figures put the United States at about $997 billion, China near $314 billion, Russia around $149 billion, Saudi Arabia about $80 billion and Ukraine roughly $65 billion. Read as capability, that table overstates the American margin and badly understates Russia’s. Military spending is dominated by personnel costs and domestically produced equipment, both of which are priced in local wages and local currency, so converting at market exchange rates flatters countries with expensive labour. Our price level field makes the correction visible: it measures how expensive a country is relative to the United States, and a country at half American price levels gets roughly twice the soldier-hours and locally built hardware per dollar. Analysts who care about capability rather than accounting therefore work in purchasing power terms, and the resulting gaps are considerably narrower than this column suggests. Two further caveats belong on any use of these numbers. Ukraine’s figure excludes the very large military aid it receives from partners, which is spent from other countries’ budgets and counted in theirs. And the comparison that matters strategically is usually accumulated stock rather than annual flow: a country that spent heavily for thirty years and then paused still owns the equipment.
Figures read from our own military expenditure 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.CD), derived from SIPRI.
Refresh cadence: Annual, with a one-to-two-year lag; taken on each rebuild.
What to watch for
Opaque states (North Korea, some Gulf states) are missing or estimated. Off-budget military industries and paramilitaries are inconsistently counted. Dollar conversion understates purchasing power in low-cost countries.
CIA World Factbook equivalent field: "Military expenditures" (frozen at the January 2026 final edition; our figures continue from live sources).