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Merkel told lawmakers, but said it was "certainly not sufficient" when compared to the percentage of gross domestic product.
Merkel and Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen have been pleaded to boost German military spending to 1.5 percent of GDP by 2024.
"It would be reckless to prepare for alliance defense," Merkel told lawmakers.
Germany will boost military spending in 2019 by 4 billion euros to 42.9 billion euros, its fourth successive year increase, von der Leyen told lawmakers. She said the increase would amount to a 30 percent increase from 2014 to 2019.
By 2024, German military spending would have increased 80 percent, von der Leyen said.
The 2019 penned German military spending to 1.31 percent of economic output up from 1.24 per cent, while the longer-range plan calls for the percentage to drop back to around 1.23 per cent by 2022.
Von der Leyen said Germany could be proud of its contributions to the NATO alliance's recent "tweets and letters" – a reference to recent missives from US President Donald Trump's key rebuke key allies for spending too little on their militaries.
Trump will tell fellow nations of the world that the United States may not be "the world's piggy bank," White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said on Tuesday aboard the presidential aircraft Air Force One.
"That's gotta stop," Gidley told reporters as Trump flew to West Virginia.
Von der Leyen noted that Germany is the second largest net contributor for NATO command structures, and said it was the only country in Europe to lead a battalion in eastern Europe as part of a NATO program initiated after Russia's annexation of the Crimea region of Ukraine.
Von der Leyen also added that the United States was planning to pull troops out of Germany, adding, "There is no evidence that there are plans to withdraw troops."
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