African Defence Budgets Ranked: Who Spends Most in 2026?

Nigeria and South Africa still post the largest nominal defence budgets in Sub-Saharan Africa, but the fastest-moving numbers in 2026 are in the Sahel, where military-ruled Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger keep pushing defence spending up even as their overall state finances tighten. This ranking sets out what is publicly confirmed about who spends what, in which currency, under which methodology — and where the public record simply runs out.

Photo: Defence ministers and heads of state of African Union troop-contributing countries at an AMISOM summit in Mogadishu, 2016. Credit: AMISOM Public Information, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Ranking African defence budgets is harder than it looks, because no two countries publish figures the same way. Some governments disclose a single defence-ministry line; others, including Nigeria, bundle defence together with police and internal-security spending into one number; several Sahelian states do not break out a defence total from their overall state budget at all. SIPRI’s own fact sheet, the most widely used comparable source, does not itemise every African country individually. Read together, the confirmed figures below still answer the underlying question: by nominal 2025–2026 spending, Nigeria and South Africa lead Sub-Saharan Africa, Angola and Kenya follow, and a second tier of West African and Sahelian states — Burkina Faso, Senegal, Ghana, Cameroon — sits in the few-hundred-million-to-just-over-a-billion-dollar range. North Africa’s three heavyweights, Algeria, Morocco and Egypt, spend more than the whole of Sub-Saharan Africa combined, but they are covered in depth on this site’s own country profiles and appear here only as continental context.

How this ranking works

Three different kinds of number appear below, and they are not interchangeable. The first is SIPRI’s military expenditure estimate, a standardised figure built to be comparable across countries and years; SIPRI’s public fact sheet only itemises a handful of African states individually (Algeria, Morocco, Egypt, South Africa, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo), with the rest folded into the North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa regional totals. The second is a government’s own published budget vote, which is official and specific but varies in scope — Nigeria’s figure, for instance, explicitly combines “defence and internal security,” while Kenya’s and South Africa’s are limited to the defence ministry itself. The third is a reported trend without a single confirmed absolute figure, which is flagged as such rather than forced into a number that cannot be sourced. SIPRI’s Military Expenditure Database records budget allocations and actual spending, not inventories, unit prices or force levels, and Global Firepower’s annual index — used elsewhere on this site for ordinal ranking only — does not publish its underlying budget methodology and is not used here as a spending source.

Sub-Saharan Africa and the Sahel: confirmed national budget figures

The table below combines SIPRI’s standardised 2025 estimates, where SIPRI breaks a country out individually, with official or near-official national budget-vote figures for fiscal year 2026 or 2026/27 where governments have published one. Currency, fiscal year and source are given for every row so the figures are not mixed across methodologies without a reader being able to see that they differ.

North Africa is not ranked within the table above, because it is outside this site’s Sub-Saharan Africa and Sahel focus and is covered in its own country-level profiles. For scale, though: SIPRI puts Algeria’s 2025 military expenditure at US$25.4 billion (up 11%, about a quarter of all Algerian public spending), Morocco’s at US$6.3 billion (up 6.6%) and Egypt’s at US$2.5 billion (up 4.3%). All three individually outspend every Sub-Saharan African state in the table above, and Algeria alone outspends the entire Sub-Saharan Africa region’s US$23.3 billion total.

For a wider Arab-world view of the same question, DefenceArabia has its own survey of Arab defence budgets: كم تنفق الدول العربية على الدفاعْ (Arabic).

Reported but not confirmed to a single figure

For several countries that matter to this site’s Sahel and procurement coverage, the public record this run did not yield one defensible, single-methodology dollar figure. Rather than force a number, these are listed with what is actually known.

What can be said about the Sahel’s military-ruled states with more confidence is directional rather than numerical: Burkina Faso’s own budget document shows defence and security consuming close to a quarter of its domestically generated resources, and Mali’s government has prioritised visible, publicly announced support to its armed forces even where a full line-item total is not released. Both juntas have leaned on security spending to justify continued military rule since their respective 2020–2023 coups, but a rigorous, single-methodology comparison across Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger is not possible from what each government currently discloses.

Why Nigeria’s and South Africa’s numbers moved the way they did

Nigeria’s FY2026 defence-and-internal-security vote of ₦5.41 trillion is the largest sectoral allocation in President Bola Tinubu’s budget, yet it represents a historic low of about 9.3% of total federal spending, a share that has fallen even as the naira-denominated total has grown; inflation has eaten into the real increase. The Nigerian Army alone receives ₦1.5 trillion, more than every other service combined, reflecting the weight of ongoing operations against Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province in the north-east and banditry in the north-west and north-central states.

South Africa’s decline is a rare case where a published cause is traceable in the budget document itself: the Force Employment programme’s reduction follows the phased withdrawal of South African National Defence Force troops from the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, as Operation Mistral (the national component of the SAMIDRC mission) closed down after 27 years of South African involvement in DRC peacekeeping. That drawdown, confirmed on this site’s own coverage, removes one of the SANDF’s most expensive standing deployments from the 2026/27 ledger.

Methodology and definitions

Figures in this article are labelled by source and treated as follows. SIPRI Military Expenditure Database / fact sheet figures are current-year USD estimates built for cross-country comparability; they are not identical to a country’s own budget vote, and SIPRI does not itemise every African state individually. Official government budget-vote figures are specific to the fiscal year and currency stated and are not automatically convertible to SIPRI’s methodology; scope (whether internal security, paramilitary forces or pensions are included) is noted wherever a source made it explicit. USD conversions from local currency are the originating source’s own conversion where one was published (e.g. Nigeria’s ₦5.41tn/$3.86bn); where DefenceMENA computed an approximate conversion (Burkina Faso, Senegal), this is an editorial estimate at approximate exchange rates current at the time of writing, not an official government conversion, and is marked as approximate. Global Firepower’s power index is an ordinal ranking tool with an undisclosed scoring methodology; it is not a spending database and is not cited here as a source of any dollar figure. SIPRI’s Trade Register “trend-indicator value” (TIV), used elsewhere on this site for arms transfers, is a different measure again and does not appear in this budgets article.

A note on the numbers

Three gaps are worth stating plainly. First, SIPRI’s public fact sheet does not break out most Sub-Saharan African states individually, which is why this article leans on national budget documents for Kenya, Burkina Faso and Senegal rather than waiting for a SIPRI line that may not exist. Second, Nigeria’s headline figure bundles defence with internal security, which inflates it relative to a narrower SIPRI-style military-expenditure estimate for the same country; both are shown above so neither is mistaken for the other. Third, for Mali, Niger, Tanzania and Ethiopia, this update could not find one figure meeting this site’s sourcing bar, and says so rather than reproducing an unsourced aggregate percentage (such as regional “share of spending” claims attributed vaguely to “data” without a named report) that repeated across several outlets this run without a traceable primary source. This page will be updated as better single-methodology figures become available, including when IISS’s Military Balance 2026 or SIPRI’s full Milex database (subscription-only in parts) can be checked directly.

Frequently asked questions

Which African country spends the most on its military?
Continent-wide, Algeria does, at an estimated US$25.4 billion in 2025 (SIPRI). Within Sub-Saharan Africa specifically, Nigeria’s FY2026 combined defence-and-internal-security budget (₦5.41 trillion, about US$3.86 billion) and South Africa’s FY2026/27 Department of Defence vote (R57.6 billion, consistent with SIPRI’s US$3.2 billion 2025 estimate) are the two largest confirmed figures, though they are not built on an identical methodology.

How much does Nigeria spend on defence in 2026?
Nigeria’s federal government proposed ₦5.41 trillion (about US$3.86 billion) for defence and internal security combined in its FY2026 budget, the largest sectoral allocation, with the Nigerian Army receiving ₦1.5 trillion of that total.

Is Global Firepower a reliable source for African military spending?
Global Firepower publishes an annual ordinal ranking built from an undisclosed in-house formula; it is useful for ordering countries relative to one another but does not publish verifiable spending figures or disclose its methodology, so it is not used here as a source for any dollar figure.

Why don’t Mali and Niger publish a specific defence budget total?
Both countries’ published 2026 budget documents give an overall state-expenditure total without breaking out a standalone defence-ministry line in the sources checked for this article, even though both governments have announced specific, publicly visible support to their armed forces (such as Mali’s January 2026 bonus to military personnel and dependants).

Does South Africa’s falling defence budget mean the SANDF is shrinking its missions?
The FY2026/27 decline is concentrated in the Force Employment programme and is officially attributed to the phased withdrawal of South African troops from the Democratic Republic of the Congo as Operation Mistral closed, rather than to a broader cut across all SANDF programmes.

How does Sub-Saharan Africa’s total spending compare with North Africa’s?
SIPRI estimates Sub-Saharan Africa’s 2025 military expenditure at US$23.3 billion, against US$35 billion for North Africa — meaning North Africa, led by Algeria, accounts for roughly 60% of the continent’s total military spending despite having far fewer states.

Last updated: 5 October 2026.

Sources

• SIPRI, Trends in World Military Expenditure 2025 (Fact Sheet), April 2026
• South African Government, Minister Angie Motshekga: Defence and Military Veterans Dept Budget Vote 2026/27
• SAnews.gov.za, “Defence budget prioritises border security, military readiness and crime-fighting support”
• Kenya Ministry of Defence, “Defence PS Presents FY 2026/27 Budget Estimates”
• Intelpoint, “Nigeria’s 2026 defence budget is just 0.5% of the USA’s”
• African Leadership Magazine, “What Nigeria’s 2026 Budget Reveals About Its Security Priorities”
• APA News, “Mali: le projet de budget 2026 adopté par le CNT”
• AllAfrica, “Burkina Faso: Un budget pour la sécurité et le développement”
• Vie Publique Sénégal, Rapport de la commission, Projet de budget 2026 du Ministère des Forces armées
• Le Soleil, “Ministère des Forces armées: une hausse de 23 milliards de FCFA pour renforcer la sécurité”
• APA News, “Niger: le budget 2026 révisé à 2 980,5 milliards FCFA”
• Business Daily Africa, “Kenya’s military spending up 17pc, hits a record high of Sh190bn”
• Defence24, “What to make of the increased defence spending in East Africa”
• Military Spending Watch, Angola country profile
• DefenceMENA, “South Africa Ends 27 Years of DRC Peacekeeping as Operation Mistral Closes”
• DefenceMENA, “Strongest Militaries in Africa”
• DefenceMENA, “Who Supplies Africa’s Weapons”
• DefenceMENA, “What Weapons Does Nigeria’s Military Operate?”