The Pentagon said the first eight weeks of the Iran war cost roughly the equivalent of the combined annual budgets of the Coast Guard, the National Park Service, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Two months after the United States and Israel began their initial attack on Iran on Feb. 28, a Pentagon official shared an estimate of the war's price tag: $25 billion.
Jules Hurst III, the Pentagon's acting comptroller, delivered the estimate to lawmakers during an April 29 Congressional hearing. Most of that money covered the cost of expended munitions, Hurst said, while some was used for operations, maintenance, and replacing equipment.
USA TODAY reported in March that munitions used in the first six days of the war cost $11.3 billion, according to estimates the Pentagon shared with lawmakers.
The Pentagon's estimated $25 billion for the war is nearly a quarter of the $101.7 billion that the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, spent on food stamps in 2025 for about 42.1 million low-income Americans each month, according to a study from the Pew Research Center.
It's twice the Coast Guard's annual budget of $13.8 billion and nearly three times the Environmental Protection Agency's $8.8 billion 2026 budget for building water systems, monitoring and studying pollution, and cleaning up waste.
The Pentagon's figure is nearly eight times the $3.3 billion Congress allocated to the National Park Service to maintain 433 sites in 2025. The war's cost is roughly on par with NASA's $24.8 billion budget last year, and just under a third of the Department of Education's $82.4 billion budget in 2025.
The war's cost is about five times the projected price of replacing Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge, which local officials estimate at $4.3 billion to $5.2 billion. The bridge collapsed after a cargo ship hit it in March 2024, killing six construction workers. The new bridge likely won't be completed until 2030.
The bill for the first two months of the Iran war is already $7 billion more than the $18 billion the U.S. government spent during the first Trump administration, in 2020 and 2021, to develop and test the COVID-19 vaccine as part of Operation Warp Speed.
The Pentagon has not explained how it calculated the $25 billion estimate and referred USA TODAY to Hurst's testimony in response to a request for further comment. Military experts and lawmakers have said Hurst's number sounds low, based on their own estimated calculations.
For one, the estimate does not appear to include the cost of damage to American military bases and assets sustained during Iran's retaliatory attacks. Rough estimates from Congress have put those losses at around $15 billion, according to a person with knowledge of one of the estimates.
CNN reported that the $25 billion estimate did not account for damage from Iran's retaliatory attacks, which sources familiar with the matter said could put the total cost of the war so far as high as $50 billion.
Pressed by Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, during the April 29 hearing, Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth said $25 billion "reflects the total cost that we're seeing."
Khanna responded that "all the experts are disagreeing with you when it comes to today's dollars in damage" to U.S. military assets and installations.
"Your $25 billion number is totally off," he told Hegseth in another exchange.
Mark Cancian, a senior advisor for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said $25 billion is "probably a little on the low side." He estimated the total cost for the same time frame at $32 billion to $35 billion.
Cancian pegged the cost of damage to U.S. bases at around $4 billion, based on an analysis the Center conducted, using images and maps of the bases.
Elevated fuel prices triggered by Iran's control of the Strait of Hormuz would also impact U.S. military operations, he said. The U.S. military "uses a lot of fuel. [It's] not clear if the $25 billion includes that, but they'll certainly be asking for it."
Pentagon officials say they may seek additional funding on top of the department's record $1.5 trillion budget request for next year.
Officials have not specified how much they plan to request or when they will submit their ask to Congress. Hegseth said during the hearing that the supplemental request would come out to "less than $25 billion, but there's a lot more we would ask for beyond just Iran."
According to recent news reports, the supplemental request could run as high as $100 billion.
