Military Spending as a Share of GDP by Country
Key Findings
About This Dataset
Military Spending as a Share of GDP by CountryMeasured 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.
Data Insights
Numbers, trends & sources behind this chart
Methodology & source
- Data source
- World Bank Open Data (SIPRI)
- Coverage
- 12 entities · 1990–2024 (8 years) · 94 observations
- Measure
- Military Spending (% of GDP)
- Last updated
- 23 August 2026
- Compiled by
- The ANYSTAT team, from the source above
- Values are shown as reported by the source. Nothing is rescaled, rebased or converted — the only changes are thousand separators and decimals shown to two places.
- Missing years are left empty rather than estimated — no interpolation, no carrying a previous year forward.
- Change is measured between the first and last year in which an entity actually reported a value, so a series that starts late is not penalised for the years before it existed.
- The compound annual rate is (last ÷ first)^(1 ÷ years) − 1, using those same two reported years.
- Entities are ranked highest-first on their value in 2024.
- An entity that reported nothing in the latest year is still listed — it follows the ranked entities in the table rather than being dropped.
Data Sources & References
All external sources cited in this dataset
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