Data / Rankings / Government spending on education, share of government spending / Countries

Countries by government spending on education, share of government spending

Sierra Leone had the highest government spending on education, share of government spending of 163 countries in 2021, at 33.4%. Papua New Guinea had the lowest, at 3.2%. The median was 12.7%. Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics.

Full ranking

Other periods

• 2022
• 2021
• 2020
• 2019
• 2018
• 2017
• 2016
• 2015
• 2014

About this ranking

General government expenditure on education as a percentage of total general government expenditure on all sectors. Calculated and published by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics.

A share of the government budget, not of GDP; for that see education_expenditure_gdp. UIS divides by total government spending from IMF figures or, for some countries, from government budget documents, so a recent year can be revised. Countries only; UIS publishes no World figure.

Every value in the ranking comes from the same publisher and the same period, so the countries are compared on one definition. 37 countries with data in other periods have no value for 2021 and are left out rather than filled from another source. Equal values share a rank.

How to cite

Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS). Government expenditure on education, total, % of government expenditure (SE.XPD.TOTL.GB.ZS). Retrieved through World Bank World Development Indicators (data.worldbank.org). https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.XPD.TOTL.GB.ZS. Retrieved 2026-10-12. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. UIS does not endorse Invokely or this use of the data.

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