This article contributes to the ongoing debate on the forms and characteristics of social investment policies and their potential trade-off with social security schemes by assessing developments of welfare spending profiles in 23 European welfare states in the 2000s. I argue that if a social investment turn has indeed occurred, it is not necessarily at the cost of the ‘old’ compensatory policies. Instead, social investment policies and their relation to compensating welfare policies alter with regard to policies targeted at different life-stages and to the type of welfare regime. Therefore, the results attest to a path-dependent trend within the welfare regimes, the Nordic countries remaining clear forerunners in terms of both level and dynamics of social investment policies. European social investment strategies manifest mainly in policies targeting childhood and youth, while a trade-off between social investment and compensating policies is evident in working-age policies to some degree.