Defence Spending
Our overview lists defence at £73.6bn — but the number you'll see attached to NATO's 2%, 2.5%, and 3.5% GDP targets is closer to £62bn. Both are real, official figures; they're just measuring different things, and mixing them up makes it look like the UK is spending far more on the military than it actually is.
How this actually works
PESA's broad 'Defence' spending function — the £73.6bn figure on our overview — bundles together the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), and UK aid programmes with a defence or security dimension. But when politicians, NATO, and most news coverage talk about "defence spending" — especially in the context of the 2%, 2.5%, and 3.5% of GDP targets — they almost always mean the narrower Ministry of Defence budget alone, which was £62.0bn in 2025/26. The gap between these two numbers, roughly £11.6bn, is entirely made up of Foreign Office and aid spending that has nothing to do with the military hardware, personnel, or bases people usually picture when they hear "defence spending." Using the broader figure isn't wrong, but quoting it as "UK defence spending" without the context makes the country look considerably closer to its NATO commitments than the MOD-only figure — the one NATO and the government itself actually use for target-tracking — shows.
Other figures you'll see reported
You'll see different numbers for this in different places. Here's why, so you're not left thinking one of them is simply wrong.
Includes MOD, Foreign Office, and aid programmes together — a genuine PESA spending category, but broader than what "defence spending" usually means in political debate.
This is the figure used for NATO's 2%/2.5%/3.5% GDP targets, and the one that matters for questions like "is the UK meeting its NATO commitment."
NATO's own definition includes certain additional security and intelligence spending beyond pure MOD budget, which is why this percentage doesn't map neatly onto either cash figure above.
The controversy
The MOD-only figure sits at the centre of a genuine, ongoing political crisis, not just definitional confusion. On 11 June 2026, Defence Secretary John Healey resigned, publishing a letter to the then-Prime Minister accusing Number 10 and the Treasury of failing to fund the government's own defence commitments — the Defence Investment Plan, meant to chart the path to the pledged 2.5% of GDP by April 2027, had already been delayed since autumn 2025 amid disputes between the MOD and Treasury. The government's commitment to reach 2.5% by 2027, then 3.5% by 2035 in line with a new NATO target, remains official policy, but the mechanism for actually funding it was still unresolved at the point of Healey's resignation. Given this context, using the broader £73.6bn 'Defence' figure to suggest the UK is closer to its NATO targets than it actually is would be genuinely misleading — the real, contested number in this live political story is the £62bn MOD-only figure, not the PESA-broad one on our overview.