World military expenditure reached 2,887 billion in 2025, the 11th consecutive year of increase and the highest level ever recorded by SIPRI. Adjusted for inflation, spending was 2.9% higher than in the previous year. Growth had reached 9.7% in 2024 and fell back to 2.9% in 2025, a difference of 6.8 percentage points and the slowest annual growth since 2021.
Global military spending kept rising, but the pace shifted from the previous year's surge to moderate growth. The key to the slowdown was the United States: its military spending fell by 7.5% in 2025, while spending by all other countries combined grew by 9.2%. Increases elsewhere were more than enough to offset the US decline and pushed the global total to a new high. In other words, the fall in US spending only slowed global growth; it did not reverse the rise in the total.
Growth came mainly from Europe and from Asia and Oceania, and countries raised spending in different ways. Germany loosened its borrowing limits, while Russia channelled more of its government budget into the war. NATO, for its part, brought infrastructure and civil preparedness into its new target, widening what counts as military spending. Reading the 2025 data therefore requires first establishing which US expenditures fell, then looking at where new spending was concentrated, how governments financed it, and whether countries count the same items as military spending.
US supplemental military aid falls to zero as submarine investment continues
US military spending was 954 billion in 2025, down 7.5% after adjusting for inflation but 11% higher than in 2016. Because SIPRI counts foreign military assistance as part of the donor country's military spending, lower aid appropriations also pull down the US total. After Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Congress began allocating supplemental funding to the Department of Defense for military aid to Ukraine and related military spending. Between 2022 and 2025, this supplemental funding totalled 127 billion. By the end of 2025, 65.1 billion of it had been disbursed.
In 2024 the Department of Defense also received 13.0 billion in supplemental appropriations for Israel-related military support. In 2025 Congress allocated no further funding of this kind to the Department of Defense for either Ukraine or Israel. Under an arrangement covering 2019–28, Israel separately received 3.8 billion in military aid from the State Department's budget, so foreign military aid did not stop entirely. What fell to zero was the additional military-aid funding Congress appropriated to the Department of Defense, which was the main reason US military spending fell in 2025.
Over the same period, US domestic weapons programmes continued to receive funding. In 2025 the nuclear-armed Columbia-class submarine programme received 9.9 billion and the conventionally armed Virginia-class submarine programme 13.9 billion. These two items show that the United States continues to channel resources into nuclear modernization and advanced conventional weapons. The new National Security Strategy released in late 2025 set maintaining military dominance in the Western Hemisphere as a goal and called for the United States to deter China in the Indo-Pacific. The two submarine appropriations alone do not prove that aid money was shifted into domestic programmes. Still, continued funding for nuclear and advanced weapons shows that this category was not cut as the total declined. The 7.5% decline mainly reflects a change in the composition of military spending and should not be read as an across-the-board US military retrenchment.
Total US military spending, supplemental appropriations to the Department of Defense (DOD) and domestic submarine programmes.
Europe's increase is nearly double that of Asia and Oceania
Military spending in Europe rose by 14% in 2025 to 864 billion, the highest of any region in both growth rate and added amount. Spending in Asia and Oceania rose by 8.1% to 681 billion. Converting both 2024 and 2025 spending to 2024 price levels removes the effect of inflation; on that basis, Europe added about 97.6 billion in a year and Asia and Oceania about 50.5 billion. Europe's increase was nearly twice as large, making it the biggest regional source of the rise in global military spending in 2025.
World military expenditure by region, 1988–2025, US billion, constant 2024 prices and exchange rates.
