EU countries spent €343.2 billion on defence in 2024, with Germany and France together accounting for 44% of this total.
Defence spending in the EU has been rising significantly as global threats intensify, with expenditure almost doubling over the last five years.
The European Defence Agency (EDA) projects that it will reach €392 billion in 2025. In 2020, spending stood at €198bn, making the change a 98% increase in nominal terms. When adjusted for inflation, the rise is 63%, still a substantial surge between 2020 and 2025.
Many security experts link this sharp rise directly to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, coupled with faltering US support for European security. With a Russia-Ukraine peace plan now in the works, experts fear that a deal favouring Moscow could threaten long-term stability if certain security guarantees are omitted. For Ukraine's neighbours, the threat of a future Russian invasion is an increasingly real risk.
So, as global peace hangs in the balance, which European states are contributing most to their defence?
Germany leads defence spending
According to EDA data, EU countries spent €343.2bn on defence in 2024. Germany tops the list by a wide margin with €90.6bn, accounting for 26.4% of total EU defence spending. France follows with €59.6bn, or 17.4% of the EU total.
Together, the two countries make up 43.8% of all EU defence spending, amounting to €150bn.
Since Eurostat’s figures are lower than the EDA’s due to classification differences, the numbers used here reflect EDA data, which are also more up to date.
Five countries account for seven in ten euros
Italy ranks third with €32.7bn, closely followed by Poland at €31.9bn. Spain then comes fifth, but its defence spending remains comparatively low among major European economies at €22.7bn. Earlier this year, US President Donald Trump notably threatened to expel Spain from NATO for resisting a commitment to increase military spending to 5% of GDP.
Collectively, the top five countries in the ranking spent €237.5bn on defence, which accounts for 69.2% of the EU total.
Fourteen countries share 8% of the EU total
A total of 14 EU countries spent less than €5bn each, and eight of them spent under €2bn. Together, this group of 14 spent €28.2bn, which is just 8.2% of the EU total. This group includes Austria (€4.9bn), Hungary (€4.5bn), and Portugal (€4.2bn). Malta, the smallest EU member state, recorded the lowest spending at only €99 million.
The UK and Turkey are major European members of NATO, even though they are not part of the EU. According to NATO, in 2024 the UK spent £65.8bn (€74.97bn) on defence, while Turkey spent around €24.4bn.
Defence spending per person
Defence spending per person varies widely across Europe, from €174 in Malta to €1,540 in Denmark in 2024. The simple average across EU countries was €686, and €764 when weighted by the EU population at the start of the year.
Besides Denmark, four more countries spend more than €1,000 per person. They are the Netherlands (€1,184), Finland (€1,140), Sweden (€1,073) and Germany (€1,069).
This figure is below €500 in ten countries, including Spain at €465.
Among the other two major economies, France spends €869 per person while Italy allocates €555.
How is defence spending changing in Europe?
“Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has been the main driving factor behind the rise in defence expenditure,” Calle Håkansson, a researcher at Swedish Defence Research Agency, told Euronews Business.
“Although defence investments in Europe had already been increasing over the past decade, the war in Ukraine marked a major turning point.”
Eurostat and EDA figures show increases in nominal spending, while EDA’s 2024 constant prices reveal the real change, adjusted to 2024 price levels.
Using 2024 constant prices, EU defence spending was €234.2bn in 2020. It rose to €343.2bn in 2024 and is expected to reach €381bn in 2025.
The real increase over the past decade, from 2015 to 2025, is 99%. In 2014, spending was at its lowest level in real terms at €188.5bn. Since then, it has risen every year.
“In 2014, EU countries — most of whom are also members of the NATO alliance — halted the trend of declining defence budgets in response to Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine,” Rafael Loss, policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), told Euronews Business.
He noted, however, that it took some years for relative defence-budget increases to surpass GDP growth and thus move closer to NATO’s 2% defence-spending goal, which the EU had then also turned to as a reference.
At a summit earlier this year, NATO members agreed to ramp up defence spending to 5% of GDP by 2035 in response to pressure from the US. Countries are aiming to spend 3.5% of output on core defence while the remaining 1.5% can be spent on wider security infrastructure.
