The United States is spending approximately $891 million every day fighting Iran, with the total bill for the conflict’s first week alone reaching $6 billion — and experts warning the final tally could climb to tens of billions more, even as the war’s economic shockwaves ripple far beyond American shores and West Asia.
The Pentagon told the US Congress that the first week of the war cost approximately $6 billion, with Republicans already expecting the administration to seek more funding, reported the New York Times on Monday.
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Analysis by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington-based think tank, put the per-day cost at $891.4 million based on Pentagon disclosures about targets struck and assets deployed.
The think tank report noted that Donald Trump’s administration may need to seek supplementary appropriations from the US Congress, as did the George W Bush administration at the start of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in the 2000s. “Any funding action will become a focal point for opposition to the war,” the CSIS researchers noted.
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The United States has already spent, in a single week, more than the gross domestic product of many small nations. To put that figure in perspective, $891 million a day is more than India’s entire annual space budget.
Approximately $4 billion of the first week’s cost was spent on munitions, mostly interceptors to shoot down Iranian missiles. Those figures dwarf the price tag of last summer’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities — Operation Midnight Hammer — which lasted just over two hours, the reports noted.
According to ‘Costs of War’, a research project at Brown University, those June 2025 strikes cost between $2.04 billion and $2.26 billion. The current conflict consumed nearly three times that in its opening 100 hours alone, as per CSIS.
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Breakdown of the daily burn
Air operations are expected to cost $30 million per day, daily naval operations around $15 million, and ground operations a further $1.6 million each day, according to CSIS.
US combat forces in the region have swelled to more than 50,000 troops — including two aircraft carriers and a dozen warships — with dozens of additional bombers and attack planes still flowing in.
The CSIS predicted that costs would fall if and when the US shifts to cheaper munitions, and if Iranian drone and missile fire diminishes.
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The scale of the daily expenditure is staggering when compared against other countries, or even within the US. At $891 million a day, the United States is exhausting the equivalent of India’s entire annual space budget every two days; Pakistan’s entire defence budget in 10 days; and Nepal’s entire annual GDP in less than two months.
As for American taxpayers, NASA’s budget for fiscal year 2026 was $24.4 billion, meaning the US military will spend the equivalent of its entire civilian space programme in less than a month of war.
How high could total go?
The campaign’s duration remains deeply uncertain as the Trump administration has offered timelines ranging from two weeks to six weeks, while changing answers to why the war was started at all.
US defence secretary Pete Hegseth made an open-ended comment at a Pentagon press conference last week, saying, “We are just getting started.”
Iran has said it can last months and that it has “not even started using our high-tech weaponry”. So far, it has been using Shahed drones and other munitions that cost much less than the US-Israeli military hardware that intercepts them.
Kent Smetters, a faculty director at the University of Pennsylvania, told CNN that a two-month war could cost between $40 billion and $95 billion in direct military expenditure, depending on whether ground troops are deployed and how quickly munitions are replenished.
The broader economic impact potentially would hit $210 billion, he said.
He backed the US argument that Iran should not have nukes, and argued that the alternative — that is, Iran obtaining and deploying a nuclear weapon — would represent “trillions upon trillions of dollars of damage”. Iran, in talks with the US and otherwise, has said it has no intention to weaponise its nuclear energy programme.
Another analyst, Lindsay Koshgarian of the National Priorities Project, told CNN that the costs were highly unpredictable: “The cost of the war in Iraq ended up being almost $3 trillion. So this could, this could be astronomical, easily.”
Pentagon officials have yet to provide their own public estimate. When pressed before a House Committee, Elbridge Colby, the under secretary of defence for policy, told lawmakers: “I’ll get back to you… I can’t give you an answer at this point.”
Iran’s plan and prep
Tehran appears to have planned for this dynamic. Its so-called Operation Madman strategy, as reported by NYT, was to expand the conflict’s reach and duration to impose maximum economic pain on the United States, Israel and their allies.
Tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz — a narrow waterway handling around a quarter of global seaborne oil trade and a fifth of the world’s liquefied natural gas supply — has come to a near standstill.
Qatar declared “force majeure” on its enormous gas export volumes following Iranian drone attacks, and sources told Reuters it may take at least a month to return to normal production levels. Qatar supplies 20 per cent of global LNG. Saudi Arabia’s Ras Tanura refinery, one of the world’s largest crude-oil export hubs, has also shut down after a drone attack, Bloomberg reported.
Brent crude has smashed through $100 a barrel, reaching a session peak of $119.50. In the US, a gallon of regular petrol reached $3.41 on Saturday, up 43 cents from a week earlier; while diesel hit $4.51 a gallon, up 75 cents. Diesel prices doubled in Europe, and jet fuel prices rose by close to 200% in Asia.
A Bloomberg Economics report has warned that sustained higher energy prices would take Europe’s economy to the brink of recession, and would place the US federal reserve in an impossible position.
What’s Trump saying?
President Trump has, meanwhile, again demanded “unconditional surrender” from Iran; as he did last June before halting the assault after 12 days.
Democrats and even some fellow Republicans have cited Trump’s own record to raise questions. In 2012, he had warned that a President starting a war with Iran would be wasting American lives for no reason; and in 2017 he told the US Congress that the US had “spent approximately $6 trillion in the Middle East” when it could have “rebuilt our country — twice”.
House Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar said last week, “He’s sending billions of our tax dollars to the Middle East for another war while he’s kicking people off of healthcare and eliminating nutrition programmes.”
Trump continues to make big boasts in long posts on Truth Social, saying he would “bring Iran back from the brink of destruction, making it economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever before”. He signed off with his “Make Iran Great Again” slogan, a play on his slogan for America.