Military Spending as a Share of GDP by Country, 1990-2024

About This Dataset

Military expenditure as a percentage of GDP for twelve countries at benchmark years from 1990 to 2024, from World Bank Open Data, which publishes the SIPRI series. Russia and Ukraine have no 1990 entry in this series.

✨ AI Insight

Measured against the size of the economy rather than in dollars, the ranking turns over completely. Ukraine is at 34.48 percent of GDP in 2024, roughly ten times the United States figure of 3.42 and the highest reading anywhere in this chart by a wide margin. Russia is at 7.05 percent, its own peak here, having sat between 3.31 and 4.87 for the previous quarter century. The long trend for most of the others is downward: the United States fell from 5.61 percent in 1990 to 3.42 in 2024, the United Kingdom from 3.98 to 2.28, South Korea from 4.00 to 2.56 and Saudi Arabia from 14.02 to 7.30. Germany is the clearest reversal, bottoming at 1.12 percent in 2015 and rising to 1.89 by 2024, and Japan, held near 1 percent for the whole period by policy, reaches its series high of 1.37 percent in the final year. China is the surprise of the chart: despite spending 32 times more dollars than in 1990, its share of GDP fell from 2.45 percent to 1.71.

Source: World Bank Open Data (SIPRI)

Key Findings

Auto-computed highlights from this dataset

🏆

Ukraine leads with 34 in 2024.

📈

Ukraine grew fastest: +1163% from 1995 to 2024 (2.73 → 34.48).

📉

Saudi Arabia declined most: -47.9% from 1990 to 2024 (14.02 → 7.30).

📊

Average value in 2024: 6 · median: 2.

📅

2024 recorded the highest combined total across all categories.

↔️

Gap in 2024: Ukraine is 25.2× larger than Japan.