European Defence Agency — Defence Data

One query and the entire EU defence economy falls out as comparable numbers. The European Defence Agency has kept these statistics since 2006, collecting them directly from the ministries of defence of all 27 Member States, with some indicator runs stretching back to 2005 - and its own verdict on the result is blunt: this is the best available, perhaps the only, source of rigorous and comparable information on European defence spending and force size.

Five indicator groups organize the payload: total defence expenditure, personnel, the expenditure breakdown (personnel versus investment versus operations and maintenance), European collaboration in equipment procurement and research and technology, and deployability. Two collective benchmarks ride along - collaborative procurement at 20% of spending, collaborative R&T at 2% - which turns a table of national figures into a scorecard.

The most recent edition quantifies the moment: EUR 418 billion of Union-wide defence spending in 2025, up 20% on 2024 and worth 2.2% of GDP, with 2026 projected at EUR 454 billion and 2.4%. Equipment procurement hit EUR 115 billion, of which 24% was collaborative - clearing the benchmark - while R&D climbed from EUR 17 billion toward an expected EUR 20 billion. Get a sample of this dataset and inspect real records before committing pipeline time.

Headline aggregates from the latest edition, exactly as they land in a row - scope, indicator, period, value:

# EU-27 headline aggregates - Defence Data 2025/2026 edition
scope=EU-27  indicator=total_defence_expenditure   period=2025    value=EUR 418 billion   change_yoy=+20%
scope=EU-27  indicator=expenditure_pct_of_gdp      period=2025    value=2.2%
scope=EU-27  indicator=total_defence_expenditure   period=2026p   value=EUR 454 billion
scope=EU-27  indicator=expenditure_pct_of_gdp      period=2026p   value=2.4%

# investment and collaboration lines
scope=EU-27  indicator=equipment_procurement       period=2025    value=EUR 115 billion   collaborative_share=24%
scope=EU-27  indicator=research_and_development    period=2025    value=EUR 17 billion    expected_2026=EUR 20 billion

# collective benchmarks scored against every Member State
benchmark=collaborative_equipment_procurement     target=20% of spending
benchmark=collaborative_research_and_technology   target=2%

Read the first block and you have the growth story in four rows: spending up a fifth in a single year, the GDP share crossing the two-percent line, and a projection attached so forecasts start from the custodian's own expectation rather than a flat-line extrapolation. Read the second block and you see where the money went - into equipment and into R&D - plus how much of it Europeans bought together instead of alone. The benchmarks at the bottom are the quiet weapon here: any per-country extract you request arrives pre-scored against them, so "which states actually pool their procurement" is a filter, not a dissertation.

Six core fields define every observation - the who, the how much and the against-what. Definitions below follow the custodian's published methodology grouping; the deeper group detail flagged underneath the table is folded into your sample on request.

• Geography: all 27 EU Member States, each reporting through its own ministry of defence, plus EU-27 aggregates computed on top - so a single pull gives you both the national panels and the Union-level totals the headlines quote.
• Temporal: country panels run from 2005 forward, collected annually since 2006. Two decades of consistent definitions is what lets you chart the post-2022 spending surge against the austerity years instead of annotating a chart with asterisks.
• Granularity: one observation per country per indicator per year, mirrored at EU level. The unit of analysis is the nation-state in a given year - ideal for burden-sharing league tables and growth panels, and the natural join key for anything else you run on country-year data.

Scale check: 27 countries times roughly twenty years times five indicator groups, plus the aggregates and the two benchmarks - a compact corpus where every row carries weight, and small enough to load whole into memory.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

You pick the channel and the cadence; the field dictionary above travels unchanged across all three. Files suit analysts loading the full 27-country panel once per planning cycle, payloads suit products that surface a single country-year figure inside an app or a briefing tool, and warehouse delivery suits teams running burden-sharing benchmarks in SQL next to their own revenue data. Changing cadence is a settings conversation, not a re-integration project.

• Defence market sizing - the EUR 418 billion 2025 baseline, its 20% year-over-step and the EUR 454 billion projection anchor TAM models for anyone selling into European defence, from primes to mid-tier suppliers.
• Collaboration analysis - the collaborative procurement and R&T shares, scored against the 20% and 2% benchmarks, show which governments actually pool capability development and which buy alone.
• Industrial strategy and supplier positioning - the investment component separates where budgets are converting into equipment and R&D from where they remain personnel and overhead, which is the difference between a growing market and a growing line item.
• Burden-sharing and policy tracking - expenditure as a share of GDP per country turns the political argument into a sorted table that updates every year.
• Force posture research - the personnel and deployability groups pair spending with bodies and readiness, so a rising budget can be tested against a shrinking or stretchable force.

Competitive intelligence and product teams get the official denominator behind every European defence claim they will ever put in a deck. Investors and quants get a two-decade country panel with growth, GDP share and investment splits - the series a defence thesis is stress-tested against. Journalists, academics and students get ministry-supplied figures carrying institutional custody, citable without a provenance footnote. Market researchers get benchmarks built in, so comparative claims need no separate normalization pass. Data scientists get a compact, cleanly keyed country-year table that joins outward to NATO, SIPRI or macroeconomic series on identifiers both sides already share.

Three things worth knowing upfront. First, indicator names inside the deeper groups are organized according to the custodian's published methodology, and we treat the finer labels as inferred until confirmed against the full per-country panel - which is exactly what your sample includes, so verification takes minutes rather than a research project. Second, these are nationally reported figures under one agreed framework; when you set them beside NATO or SIPRI numbers you are comparing different membership sets and slightly different definitions, so plan joins on country and year and expect small definitional deltas rather than contradictions. Third, figures can be restated after initial reporting - we version every delivery, so a revised year updates your history instead of silently overwriting it.

Notes that pair well with this page:

• Aerospace & Defense data hub - the pooled industry view this record sits inside, from airworthiness directives to arms-transfer flows.
• NATO Defence Expenditure Data - the alliance's 32-member view of the same spending surge, overlapping 21 of these 27 countries.
• SIPRI Military Expenditure Database - the global independent estimate series to reconcile against ministry-supplied figures.
• Best aerospace & defense datasets - where this dataset ranks among the strongest sources for the sector.