How do NATO common budgets compare, proportionally, to total national defence budgets of major allies like the U.S., Germany and the UK?
Executive summary
NATO’s three common-funded budgets — the Civil Budget, the Military Budget and the NATO Security Investment Programme — total only a few billion euros a year (roughly €4–5.3 billion in recent public figures), a sum that is vanishingly small compared with the annual national defence outlays of major allies (the alliance’s common funds are an administrative and infrastructure pool, not a substitute for national forces) [1]. The United States, Germany and the United Kingdom are among the largest direct contributors to that common pot, but each country’s share of NATO’s common budgets represents only a tiny fraction of its own national defence spending, while the United States separately accounts for the lion’s share of combined NATO-era national defence expenditure [1] [2] [3].
1. NATO’s common budgets are small in absolute terms and purpose-built
NATO distinguishes direct, common funding — payments into the Civil Budget, the Military Budget and the NATO Security Investment Programme — from national (or indirect) contributions, and recent NATO public statements put those common funds at around EUR 4.6 billion for 2025 and up to EUR 5.3 billion for 2026 [1]. Reporting that uses slightly older baselines gives figures near €3.8 billion for a year, but all sources converge on the same point: these sums pay for headquarters, the command structure, some shared infrastructure and selected collective capabilities rather than substituting for national armed forces [4] [1].
2. Major allies pay meaningful shares of the common pot — but it’s a sliver of their own defence budgets
The United States and Germany are identified as the largest direct payers into NATO’s common budget (each around 15–16 percent of the common budget), with the UK typically listed as the next-largest direct contributor (around 11 percent), meaning each country’s direct cash transfer into Nato’s common funds runs to a few hundred million euros per year — not billions — depending on the base-year estimate used [2] [5]. Those payment shares are often used politically to quantify “who pays what” for Alliance upkeep, but the key point is that each country’s common-fund contribution is only a small line-item relative to that country’s entire defence expenditure under national budgets [2] [5].
3. The United States dominates combined NATO-era national defence spending, amplifying the contrast
While the U.S. contributes roughly the same percentage share of the common budget as Germany (about 15–16 percent of the common pot), it is by far the largest single national spender on defence overall: one analysis shows the U.S. accounted for roughly $860 billion of the alliance’s combined defence expenditure in 2023 — about 68 percent of the total combined NATO-area defence spending — which makes the U.S. share of common-fund payments look small by comparison to the scale of its national defence outlay [3]. This explains why political statements that conflate “who pays NATO” with “who pays for defence in Europe” are misleading: the common budget is not the principal locus of defence capability funding [3] [1].
4. What the numbers imply: proportionally tiny but politically significant
Proportionally, therefore, NATO’s common budgets represent a minute fraction of major allies’ total national defence budgets: the whole common pot is measured in a few billion euros while national defence spending for large members runs into tens or hundreds of billions, meaning contributions to the common fund amount to well under a single-digit percentage — often well under 1 percent — of those national defence budgets (the cited sources provide the common-fund totals and the shares of contributors but do not publish a consistent country-by-country ratio of common-fund contribution to total national defence outlay within the provided snippets) [1] [2] [3]. That small proportional size is also why NATO stresses that “national (or indirect) contributions” — forces, equipment, national spending on troops and procurement — remain the dominant element of Alliance capability [1].
5. Political misreadings and the hidden agenda of headline arithmetic
Public debate sometimes weaponizes the common-budget share figures — for example, claims that the U.S. “pays 90–100 percent” of NATO are refuted by data showing U.S. direct contributions to the common budget are roughly 15–16 percent and that U.S. national defence spending dwarfs the rest of the Alliance in overall scale [2] [3]. Still, there are implicit agendas on both sides: critics who emphasize common-budget shares often seek to pressure allies on burden-sharing rhetoric, while proponents of higher national spending (or of targets such as the newly discussed 5% of GDP goal) frame bigger national budgets as necessary for autonomy and deterrence — an argument that may also serve domestic defense-industrial interests [2] [6].
6. Limits of this assessment and what remains to be quantified
The available sources clearly demonstrate the small absolute size of NATO’s common budgets and the relatively modest direct shares paid by the U.S., Germany and the UK [1] [2] [5], and they show the much larger scale of national defence spending—especially the U.S. role [3]. However, the precise percentage that each ally’s annual contribution to NATO’s common funds represents of that ally’s total national defence budget in the most recent fiscal year is not provided explicitly across these snippets, so producing exact country-by-country ratios here would exceed the specific figures supplied [1] [2] [3].