September 8, 2025

Defence Spending: Who Is Doing What? September 2025

See the data examined in July 2024

See the data examined in April 2024

See the data examined in February 2023

See the data examined in July 2023

At their Summit in The Hague in June, NATO heads of state and government agreed to spend, by 2035, 3.5% of their GDP on core defence, as well as 1.5% on defence-related projects such as military infrastructure and measures to enhance resilience and support the European defence industry. Compared to the previous 2% target, adopted at the Wales Summit in 2014, this is a huge increase in the amount Allies have pledged to spend on defence. According to NATO’s new estimates, 2025 will be the first year in which all Allies (except Iceland) will meet the previous 2% target. NATO also expects five Allies (Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Norway, the US) to spend more than 3% and two Allies (Lithuania, Poland) to spend more than 4%. Furthermore, as Europe’s rearmament ramps up, Allies have announced a wide range of acquisition programmes to add substance to their spending plans. In 2025, all NATO members except for Belgium are expected to fulfil NATO’s 20% target for investments in equipment too.

While the main driver for increased spending is the need to implement the regional defence plans adopted by NATO in 2023 in response to the threat from Russia, the 5% (3.5% + 1.5%) target itself is largely a response to the Trump administration’s amplification of longstanding US complaints that the European Allies should do more for their own security. The new NATO figures demonstrate that NATO Europe and Canada are, in fact, catching up with the Americans. In 2015, NATO Europe and Canada were responsible for just 28% of NATO’s total defence spending. By 2024, largely because of increased European spending, this figure had risen to 36% and is expected to reach 38% this year.

But the NATO data also indicates the scale of the challenge that Europe faces in reaching the new target. Today, 16 Allies—half of the Alliance—barely exceed the 2% threshold, with spending in 2025 estimated to be between 2 and 2.1% of GDP. Only three Allies (Latvia, Lithuania, Poland) will reach the 3.5% goal this year and, according to publicly available longer-term perspectives, few yet have concrete plans for doing so. Nonetheless, compared to the situation in July 2024, several Allies are planning to reach previously declared targets faster. For example, Italy expects to get to 2% three years earlier, Spain five years earlier, and Belgium, ten years earlier. Other Allies have maintained their original target dates, but increased target expenditure volumes. For 2026, for example, Norway’s plans have increased by an additional 2.8% of GDP, Poland’s by 2.0% and the Baltic states’ each by around 2%.

At the start of a new ten-year defence investment pledge (the target date of 2035 was a compromise—several Allies argued for quicker implementation) there are good reasons to be optimistic that Europe will deliver on its promise to invest more in defence. But, as the considerably less ambitious Wales defence pledge showed, it is relatively easy to make promises for political reasons, but much harder, especially when there are no sanctions for non-compliance, to ensure implementation.

The table below gathers data on the Allies’ recent defence expenditure of 2015, 2021 (the last year before Russia’s full-scale invasion) and 2025, as well as longer-term expectations and military spending priorities.