NATO, as an organization, has released a reporton the defense spending of its member states with data for 2025 and visual information regarding these expenditures. However, it should be noted right away that the charts do not include (or only provide conditional) data for Germany, since it does not yet have an approved budget for 2025.
The first thing to note is that all countries have finally met the requirement of 2% of GDP for defense spending, which was adopted back in 2014. And this marks quite a significant leap for eight countries that last year spent between 1.28%, like Spain, which ranked last, and 1.81%, like Croatia.
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This time, the minimum indicator of exactly 2% is shared by six countries — Portugal, North Macedonia, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Spain, and Luxembourg. At the same time, three more countries pulled slightly ahead with 2.01% — Italy, Canada, and Albania.
At the top in terms of GDP share for defense is Poland with 4.48%, followed by all three Baltic republics: Lithuania at 4%, Latvia at 3.73%, and Estonia at 3.38%. Another country sharing a border with russia — Norway — rounds out the top five with 3.35%.
The United States spends 3.22% on defense, although in monetary terms the situation is, of course, entirely different. American defense expenditures in 2025 account for 60.18% of NATO's total defense budget, which exceeds $1.66 trillion.
At the same time, now that all countries have met the 2% requirement, the key indicator for identifying candidates for the "hall of shame" has become a different one — the share of expenditures on weapons within overall defense spending. This figure is indeed important, because in some cases countries have hidden military pensions under defense spending and increased those, instead of strengthening real defense capability.
Therefore, at least 20% of total defense spending must be allocated to the procurement and development of new weapons.
And in this regard, Belgium fell significantly short, spending only 14.5% of its defense budget on weapons. Portugal hit exactly 20%. Meanwhile, Germany’s figure is only conditional, due to the lack of an approved budget, and Denmark apparently did not provide exact data, simply stating that the requirement had been met.
It should also be noted that the highest indicator of real weapons spending is in Poland, which allocates 54.5% of its already large defense budget to armaments. However, Warsaw is already sounding the alarm, as the Ministry of National Defense risks bankruptcy due to massive arms purchases worth more than $66 billion.
Finally, a rather telling combined chart shows on one axis the overall share of defense spending relative to GDP, and on the other the share spent on weapons. It would be useful to add distance to russia as another factor, since this often explains the numbers.
Another important chart shows the overall distribution of defense spending across four categories — personnel maintenance (salaries and other social costs), creation and repair of infrastructure, operational activity, and the already mentioned procurement and development of weapons.
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