Dataset · U.S. Department of State

Armed Forces Personnel (% of population)

11 years, 2009–2019 · 140 countries · 2 measures

What share of each country's population serves in its armed forces — active-duty personnel on the payroll, including paramilitary forces able to fight, as estimated by the U.S. State Department's World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers report. The report's final edition, published in 2021, covers 2009 to 2019.

This site holds every year from 2009 to 2019, read from U.S. Department of State’s own data and stored exactly as published.

Open Armed Forces Personnel (% of population), 2019 Download all 11 · CSV See it charted by country →

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Armed Forces Personnel (% of population) · the file

Newest: Armed Forces Personnel (% of population), 2019
Held: 11 years · 1,537 rows
Licence: Public domain or CC0

11years held
2009–2019years
1,537rows across every year
140countries in the newest
2measures per country
Public domain or CC0licence

0111 years

Every year

Every year comes from U.S. Department of State’s 2021 release, recalculated on one method. Each opens the full table for that year; each downloads as a CSV.

2009bar height: countries covered, up to 1402019

Every year of Armed Forces Personnel (% of population) held on this site, newest first, with its download files.
Year	Countries	Change	Read	Download
Armed Forces Personnel (% of population), 2019Newest	140	±0	September 29, 2026	CSV
Armed Forces Personnel (% of population), 2018	140	±0	September 29, 2026	CSV
Armed Forces Personnel (% of population), 2017	140	±0	September 29, 2026	CSV
Armed Forces Personnel (% of population), 2016	140	±0	September 29, 2026	CSV
Armed Forces Personnel (% of population), 2015	140	±0	September 29, 2026	CSV
Armed Forces Personnel (% of population), 2014	140	±0	September 29, 2026	CSV
Armed Forces Personnel (% of population), 2013	140	±0	September 29, 2026	CSV
Armed Forces Personnel (% of population), 2012	140	+1	September 29, 2026	CSV
Armed Forces Personnel (% of population), 2011	139	±0	September 29, 2026	CSV
Armed Forces Personnel (% of population), 2010	139	±0	September 29, 2026	CSV
Armed Forces Personnel (% of population), 2009	139	—	September 29, 2026	CSV

Every year in one file, one row per country per year: armed-forces-personnel-all-editions-nations-inquiry.csv

025 columns

What’s in the file

Every column, what it holds, how it is stored and what its values look like — what a reader needs before opening the file.

Every column in the newest file of Armed Forces Personnel (% of population): what it holds, how it is stored, and its range.
Column	What it holds	Stored as	Range, 2019	Distinct	Empty
Country`country`Name	The country’s name, as this file spells it.	Text	—	140	0
ISO Code`country_code`Identifier	The ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 code, added by this site. Every table here joins on it.	Text · 3 letters	—	140	0
Armed forces personnel (% of population)`armed_forces_share`Headline	The headline figure: Active-duty armed forces personnel (% of population).	Number · up to 2 decimals	0.044 share it4.602 share itmiddle 0.26	60	0
Armed forces personnel (thousands)`armed_forces_thousands`Measure	The number of active-duty armed forces personnel, in thousands, as the report estimates it.	Number · whole numbers	14 share it1,780Chinamiddle 25	62	0
WMEAT uncertainty flag`observation_status`Flag	The report's own mark of doubt: highly uncertain where it printed the figure in green, extremely uncertain where it printed it in blue; blank where it printed neither.	Text	—	2	118

Profiled from the newest file. Range: the lowest and highest value, with the country holding it when only one does. Spread: countries in ten equal steps from lowest to highest. A higher value is the worse result.

03140 countries across every year

Who is covered

How many countries each year holds, continent by continent, who joined and who left, and which places this site covers that the dataset never has.

All regions

Countries in each year of Armed Forces Personnel (% of population), by continent.
	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015	2016	2017	2018	2019
Africa	50	50	50	51	51	51	51	51	51	51	51
Americas	26	26	26	26	26	26	26	26	26	26	26
Asia	46	46	46	46	46	46	46	46	46	46	46
Europe	13	13	13	13	13	13	13	13	13	13	13
Oceania	4	4	4	4	4	4	4	4	4	4	4
All	139	139	139	140	140	140	140	140	140	140	140

Who joined and who left

2012
+ South Sudan

Not in this dataset · 85 places this site covers

U.S. Department of State gives no figure for these in any year held here. It is the publisher’s choice of scope, and each place’s profile shows what is measured.

British Virgin Islands

Bulgaria

Canada

Cayman Islands Channel Islands

North Macedonia Northern Cyprus

Northern Mariana Islands

Saint Kitts and Nevis

Saint Lucia

Saint Martin

Saint Vincent and the Grenadines

Samoa

San Marino

São Tomé and Príncipe

Solomon Islands Somaliland

Spain

Tonga

Türkiye

Turks and Caicos Islands

Tuvalu

United Kingdom

United States

United States Virgin Islands

Vanuatu

Vatican City

04Provenance

Where it comes from

The path from the publisher to this page, and what was checked and changed on the way.

The site’s method

1 · Publisher
U.S. Department of State
state.gov
2 · Their file
Armed Forces Personnel (% of population), 2019 (WMEAT 2021)
WMEAT-2021-Table-I-Military-Expenditures-and-Armed-Forces-Personnel-2009-2019.xlsx
3 · Read by this site
September 29, 2026
Imported by a script that parses each figure and writes it down unrounded.
4 · Stored as
11 files, one per year
Each downloads as a CSV, or every year together as armed-forces-personnel-all-editions-nations-inquiry.csv
5 · Used on
Its statistic page, and every profile it measures
/statistics/armed-forces-personnel

Precision

The headline is stored to 2 decimals, as published.

Rounded by this site

Never. Tables on screen may show fewer decimals; the files never do.

Changed by this site

Reshaped into one row per country: regional and income-group totals are left out, only the columns listed are kept, each row gets its ISO 3166 code, and some country names are brought to one spelling. No value is recalculated, rescaled or rounded.

From Table I of the State Department's World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers 2021, a U.S. Government work in the public domain, stored as the report prints it. The State Department has stopped publishing the report.

05Reuse

Licence and credit

What the publisher’s licence lets you do, what it asks of you, and a credit line and citation ready to copy.

Every publisher’s terms

Licence · checked September 29, 2026

Public domain (U.S. Government work)

Share and redistribute it
Adapt it and build on it
Use it commercially

No conditions at all. Crediting the publisher is still the courteous thing to do.

In plain words

A U.S. Government work in the public domain, free to reuse; the State Department asks to be credited as the source. Figures the report copied from NATO are not included.

A credit line

Source: U.S. Department of State, Armed Forces Personnel (% of population), via Nations Inquiry.

Cite this dataset

U.S. Department of State. Armed Forces Personnel (% of population), 2009–2019 [data set]. As held by Nations Inquiry, https://nationsinquiry.com/datasets/armed-forces-personnel

The publisher’s own citation: U.S. Department of State. World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers 2021, Table I. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, December 2021.

Plain-language summary, not legal advice. The licence text is what binds.

06Where it is used

Around the site

Where these numbers appear on this site, and the datasets nearest to it.

Charted
Armed Forces Personnel (% of population) by country
Who is highest, the map, the spread, who rose and fell, and the records.
Subjects
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07Questions