President Donald Trump repeated his claim that before he prodded NATO members to spend more on defense, the US was “paying for almost all of NATO.”
His comment in the State of the Union address was an exaggeration. NATO figures show that in 2016, the year before Trump took office the first time, US defense spending made up about 72% of total NATO defense spending; in 2024, the year before he returned to office, it was about 63%.
Both figures are big, of course, but “almost all” is a stretch” — and the US contributes a smaller percentage to NATO’s own organizational budget. Under an agreed formula, the US provided about 16% of that budget at the time Trump returned to office in 2025. When he took office in 2017, the US was contributing about 22% of the budget.
Trump touted NATO members’ 2025 commitment to spend 5% of gross domestic product on defense-related and security-related spending by 2035 — including at least 3.5% of GDP on the “core” defense requirements that were covered by the previous target of 2% of GDP — saying they agreed “to pay 5% of GDP for military defense, rather than the 2% which they weren’t paying…Now they’re paying 5 (percent) as opposed to not paying 2 (percent).”
But most NATO members are not yet meeting the new higher target, which, again, they have given themselves a decade to meet. NATO estimates show that just three members, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, were at or above 3.5% in core defense spending in 2025, though they may be joined by others in 2026.
“It’s absolutely not true that the Allies are currently ‘paying 5%’ on hard defense, and even by 2035 they’ve only committed to 3.5%, in terms of their defense budget conventionally-understood. As of mid-2025, *no* Ally is spending 5%, in fact not even 4.5%,” professor Erwan Lagadec of George Washington University said in January.