Who pays most for nato
Executive summary
The United States pays the most for NATO in absolute terms and is one of the largest direct contributors to NATO’s common budgets — roughly 15–16% of the alliance’s annual common budget — but that metric understates how overall burden-sharing actually works because national defense spending (paid domestically) dwarfs NATO’s pooled budgets and different countries lead on different measures such as share of GDP or contributions to specific investment programmes [1] [2] [3].
1. The headline: the U.S. is the biggest single payer in absolute terms
By dollar volume the United States is NATO’s largest financial actor: Reuters and other fact-checking reporting put U.S. contributions to NATO’s annual common budget at about 15.8–16% rather than the two‑thirds sometimes claimed, and NATO’s common budget itself runs in the low billions of euros (around €3.8–€5.3 billion depending on which common funds and year are counted) [1] [3] [4] [2]. That means Washington contributes the largest single share to the alliance’s pooled, common budgets — civil, military and the NATO Security Investment Programme — even while U.S. national defence spending (hundreds of billions annually) is far larger than alliance common budgets and should not be conflated with NATO budget shares [1] [3] [5].
2. But NATO money is small relative to national defence bills — and those are shared differently
NATO’s common funded budgets — the civil and military budgets and NSIP — total only a few billion euros (civil budget €528.2 million and military budget €2.42 billion for 2026, with common funds overall about €4.6–5.3 billion for 2025–26) and are paid according to an agreed cost‑sharing formula based on national income, where the U.S., Germany and the United Kingdom are among the largest direct payers by percentage of the common budget [4] [3] [2]. Separate from common funds, national defence expenditures — what each government spends on its own armed forces — are the dominant financial burden for collective defence and are borne independently by each ally [3] [6].
3. Different ways to define “who pays most”: absolute dollars, budget share, or GDP share
If the question is absolute spending on defence and NATO-related commitments, the United States remains preeminent, with U.S. national defence spending far exceeding the combined market exchange figures of other NATO members and with a dominant role in capability provision [5]. If the metric is share of NATO’s pooled common budget, the U.S. is again the largest single contributor at about 16%, followed by other big economies such as Germany and the UK that together make up the core tranche of common funding [1] [2]. But if the metric is defence spending as a share of national GDP — the political measure NATO uses to judge commitment — smaller countries such as Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia spend a higher percentage of GDP (Poland recorded 4.48% of GDP in 2025, Lithuania 4.0%, Latvia 3.73%) and several eastern European allies exceed the 2% and even 3.5% benchmarks [7] [8].
4. New targets and changing dynamics shift who shoulders future costs
Allies agreed new collective targets at the 2025 summit — notably a longer‑term goal of 5% of GDP on defence by 2035 with interim commitments of at least 3.5% for core defence — which will reshape expectations about how much each ally must spend domestically to meet NATO capability needs; those national increases will change the balance of who “pays most” in terms of defence capacity and procurement, even if pooled NATO budgets remain a small share of the total [9] [8]. NATO’s NSIP and other investment programmes also require rising national contributions: recent U.S. budget documents note that allies will carry a large share of the increased NSIP funding and that allies are expected to provide 84% of the increase in one recent assessment, underscoring that burden‑sharing debates now extend beyond headline common budgets [10].
5. Bottom line and caveats
On any straightforward accounting of direct contributions to NATO’s common funds and in absolute national defence spending, the United States pays most; on GDP‑share measures of commitment, smaller eastern European allies often lead; and on investment programmes and procurement the pattern can vary by project and cost‑share rules — all of which means the simple question “who pays most for NATO” requires clarifying whether the measure is pooled NATO budget share, absolute national defence outlays, or defence spending as a share of GDP [1] [2] [7] [3].