The same budgets divided by the people they pay for — first at market exchange rates, then adjusted for what a dollar actually buys inside each country’s defence sector.
| Country | Active personnel | Budget (market) | Per soldier (market) | Budget (military PPP) | Per soldier (PPP) | PPP uplift |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 1,285,084 | $954.0bn | $742k | $954.0bn | $742k | 1.0× |
| Russia | 1,134,000 | $190.9bn | $168k | $412.6bn | $364k | 2.2× |
| China | 2,035,000 | $335.3bn | $165k | $611.7bn | $301k | 1.8× |
| India | 1,376,729 | $92.0bn | $67k | $336.8bn | $245k | 3.7× |
| Ukraine | 800,000 | $84.2bn | $105k | $185.2bn | $232k | 2.2× |
| South Korea | 450,000 | $47.8bn | $106k | $99.8bn | $222k | 2.1× |
| Brazil | 376,000 | $23.9bn | $64k | $70.1bn | $186k | 2.9× |
| Turkey | 494,500 | $30.1bn | $61k | $67.9bn | $137k | 2.3× |
| Indonesia | 433,700 | $15.1bn | $35k | $51.0bn | $118k | 3.4× |
Personnel figures as in the table above. Spending and military-PPP figures: Peter E. Robertson, Military PPP database, preliminary 2025 estimates (v26.1, May 2026), built on SIPRI and IISS data. Per-soldier figures are our own division of one by the other. Military PPP differs from ordinary GDP PPP: it prices personnel, operations and equipment separately, because a conscript’s wage is local but a fighter jet is priced globally. No military-PPP estimate exists for North Korea, Pakistan, Iran, Vietnam, Egypt or Thailand — the method depends on budget reporting to the UN — so six of the personnel top fifteen cannot be shown here.