Which Countries Spend the Most on Defense, and What It Actually Buys Them
2026-09-19 · by Jordi Fuster
WorldRelat tracks military expenditure for every country in its database, in both raw dollar terms and as a share of GDP — and the two rankings tell almost entirely different stories.
The biggest budgets in absolute terms
By raw spending, the United States is in a category of its own: roughly $997 billion in 2024, more than the next several countries on this list combined. China is a distant second at about $314 billion, followed by Russia at $149 billion, Germany at $88 billion, India at $86 billion, the United Kingdom at $82 billion, Saudi Arabia at $80 billion, Ukraine at $65 billion, France at roughly the same figure, and Japan at $55 billion.
The picture changes completely as a share of GDP
Rank the same countries by military spending as a percentage of their economy, and an entirely different list appears. Ukraine spends 34.5% of its entire GDP on its military — an extraordinary number that reflects a country fighting for its survival, not a policy choice made from a position of comfort. Eritrea is next at 20.9%, despite a military budget of only about $182 million in absolute terms — proof that a small, poor economy can still commit an enormous relative share of what little it has. Israel spends 8.8% of GDP, Algeria 8.0%, Saudi Arabia 7.3%, and Russia 7.1% — each a genuinely heavy military burden relative to the size of its economy, even where the absolute dollar figure looks modest by comparison to the United States or China.
Why both numbers matter
Raw spending measures capability: the United States' nearly trillion-dollar budget buys a scale of equipment, research and global reach that no percentage-of-GDP figure captures on its own. But the percentage figure measures something just as real — how much of a country's total economic output is being redirected toward defense instead of anything else, and for how long that's sustainable. A country spending a third of its GDP on its military, as Ukraine currently is, is making a trade-off that simply isn't available to an economy the size of the United States or China without radical disruption elsewhere. The two rankings aren't in competition with each other; they're answering two different questions about the same underlying number.
For any individual matchup, both figures — along with GDP, population and military personnel — now feed directly into how the War Simulator calculates a victory percentage, rather than spending being treated in isolation.