Member states of NATO


The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is an international military alliance consisting of 32 member states from Europe and North America. It was established at the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty on 4 April 1949. Of the 32 member countries, 30 are in Europe and 2 are in North America. Between 1994 and 1997, wider forums for regional cooperation between NATO and its neighbours were set up, including the Partnership for Peace, the Mediterranean Dialogue initiative, and the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council.
All members have militaries, except for Iceland, which does not have a typical army. Three of NATO's members are nuclear weapons states: France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. NATO has 12 original founding member states. Three more members joined between 1952 and 1955, and a fourth joined in 1982. Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has added 16 more members from 1999 to 2024. Article 5 of the treaty states that if an armed attack occurs against one of the member states, it shall be considered an attack against all members, and other members shall assist the attacked member, with armed forces if necessary. Article 6 of the treaty limits the scope of Article 5 to the islands north of the Tropic of Cancer, the North American and European mainlands, the entirety of Turkey, and French Algeria, the last of which has been moot since July 1962. Thus, an attack on Hawaii, Puerto Rico, French Guiana, the Falkland Islands, Ceuta or Melilla, among other places, would not trigger an Article 5 response.
NATO recognizes Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, and Ukraine as aspiring members as part of their Open Door enlargement policy.

Founding members and enlargement

NATO was established on 4 April 1949 via the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty. The 12 founding members of the Alliance were: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
The various allies all signed the Ottawa Agreement, which is a 1951 document that acts to embody civilian oversight of the Alliance.
Current membership consists of 32 countries. In addition to the 12 founding countries, four new members joined during the Cold War: Greece and Turkey, West Germany and Spain. Additionally, NATO experienced territorial expansion during this period without adding new member states when Zone A of the Free Territory of Trieste was annexed by Italy in 1954, and the territory of the former East Germany was added with the reunification of Germany in 1990. NATO further expanded after the Cold War, adding the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland ; Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia ; Albania and Croatia ; Montenegro ; North Macedonia ; Finland ; and Sweden. Of the territories and members added between 1990 and 2024, all except for Finland and Sweden were either formerly part of the Warsaw Pact or territories of the former Yugoslavia. No countries have left NATO since its founding, although France withdrew from NATO unified command between 1966 and 2009.
Since the accession of Sweden on 7 March 2024, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization covers a total area of.
In October 2025, during a meeting between US president Donald Trump and Finnish president Alexander Stubb, Trump claimed that Spain fails to meet the budget agreement of 5% GDP defense expenditure and was quoted saying: "You people are gonna have to start speaking to Spain,... You have to call them and find why are they a laggard."

List of member states

The current members and their dates of admission are listed below.
FlagMapNameCapitalAccessionPopulationAreaMilitary budget as %GDP 2024GDP 2025 Languages
AlbaniaTirana2,854,7102.0328,372Albanian
BelgiumBrussels11,611,4191.30684,864Dutch
French
German
BulgariaSofia6,885,8682.18117,007Bulgarian
CanadaOttawa38,155,0121.372,225,341English
French
CroatiaZagreb4,060,1351.8198,951Croatian
Czech RepublicPrague10,510,7512.10360,244Czech
DenmarkCopenhagen5,854,2402.37449,940Danish
EstoniaTallinn1,328,7013.4345,004Estonian
FinlandHelsinki5,619,3992.41303,945Finnish
Swedish
FranceParis64,531,4442.063,211,292French
GermanyBerlin


83,408,5542.124,744,804German
GreeceAthens10,445,3653.08267,348Greek
HungaryBudapest9,709,7862.11237,070Hungarian
IcelandReykjavík370,3350.035,309Icelandic
ItalyRome59,240,3291.492,422,855Italian
LatviaRiga1,873,9193.1543,598Latvian
LithuaniaVilnius2,786,6512.8589,192Lithuanian
LuxembourgLuxembourg639,3211.2996,613Luxembourgish
French
German
MontenegroPodgorica627,8592.028,562Montenegrin
NetherlandsAmsterdam17,501,6962.051,272,011Dutch
North MacedoniaSkopje2,103,3302.2217,885Macedonian
NorwayOslo5,403,0212.20504,276Norwegian
PolandWarsaw38,307,7264.12979,960Polish
PortugalLisbon10,290,1031.55321,440Portuguese
RomaniaBucharest19,328,5602.25403,395Romanian
SlovakiaBratislava5,447,6222.0147,031Slovak
SloveniaLjubljana2,119,4101.2975,224Slovene
SpainMadrid47,486,9351.281,799,511Spanish
SwedenStockholm10,467,0972.14620,297Swedish
TurkeyAnkara84,775,4042.091,437,406Turkish
United KingdomLondon67,281,0392.333,839,180English
United StatesWashington, D.C.336,997,6243.3830,507,217English

Special arrangements

The three Nordic countries which joined NATO as founding members, Denmark, Iceland and Norway, chose to limit their participation in three areas: there would be no permanent peacetime bases, no nuclear warheads and no Allied military activity permitted on their territory. However, Denmark allowed the US to maintain an existing base, Thule Air Base, in Greenland.
From the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s, France pursued a military strategy of independence from NATO under a policy dubbed "Gaullo-Mitterrandism". Nicolas Sarkozy negotiated the return of France to the integrated military command and the Defence Planning Committee in 2009, the latter being disbanded the following year. France remains the only NATO member outside the Nuclear Planning Group and unlike the United States and the United Kingdom, will not commit its nuclear-armed submarines to the alliance.

Membership aspirations

, three additional states have formally informed NATO of their membership aspirations: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, and Ukraine.
No state has ever withdrawn from NATO, but some dependencies of member states have not requested membership after becoming independent:

  • Military personnel

The following list is constructed from The Military Balance, published annually by the International Institute for Strategic Studies.