In 2023, by far the highest number of individuals with net assets of at least ** million U.S. dollars worldwide were residing in North America, reaching over ******* people. Asia recorded the second highest number of UHNWIs in the world with over ******* individuals.A small share owns vast sums of wealthThe vast majority of global wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few people. Only *** percent of the global population owns assets worth more than *** million U.S. dollars. The richest people in the world are Elon Mask, Jeff Bezos, and Bernard Arnault. When it comes to women, Francoise Bettencourt Meyers led the ranking of the most affluent women worldwide. The wealth of over ** percent of UHNWIs was self-made. Where UHNWIs live and where they leave Unsurprisingly, as North America is the world region with the highest number of UHNWIs, the United States is the country with the highest UHNWI count. However, Hong Kong, special administrative (SAR) region in China, is the city with the highest number of UHNWIs. Nevertheless, China was the country that recorded the highest outflux of UHNWIs in 2022.

In 2023, roughly 1.49 billion adults worldwide had a net worth of less than 10,000 U.S. dollars. By comparison, 58 million adults had a net worth of more than one million U.S. dollars in the same year. Wealth distribution The distribution of wealth is an indicator of economic inequality. The United Nations says that wealth includes the sum of natural, human, and physical assets. Wealth is not synonymous with income, however, because having a large income can be depleted if one has significant expenses. In 2023, nearly 1,700 billionaires had a total wealth between one to two billion U.S. dollars. Wealth worldwide China had the highest number of billionaires in 2023, with the United States following behind. That same year, New York had the most billionaires worldwide.

As of 2019, 84 percent of millionaires in the United States had a net worth of between one million and two and a half million U.S. dollars. On the other end of the scale, 0.01 percent of millionaires had a net worth of over 500 million U.S. dollars.

Research done by the Credit Suisse Research Institute states that the country with the highest number of millionaires is the U.S., with nearly 30 million millionaires and 17 million people with wealth up to $5 million! To put numbers in perspective, China, Japan, Germany, the U.K., and France, added together, have a total of 17 million millionaires!

In 2023, there were nearly 22 million people with a net worth of over one million U.S. dollars in the United States, which put the country on the top of the ranking. China was ranked second in that year, with more than six million individuals with wealth exceeding one million U.S. dollars. The United Kingdom followed in third with around three million millionaires.

Data from the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report shows that in 2023 there were just under 30 million millionaires in the US.

New Jersey has the highest rate of millionaires, with 9.76% of households showing a net worth of $1 million or above. That means that 246,058 New Jersey households are millionaires.

Graph and download economic data for Net Worth Held by the Top 0.1% (99.9th to 100th Wealth Percentiles) (WFRBLTP1246) from Q3 1989 to Q1 2025 about net worth, wealth, percentile, Net, and USA.

In 2023, ******* individuals with net assets of at least ** million U.S. dollars were residing in the *************, by far the highest number of any country. By comparison, *****, which had the second highest number of ultra high net worth individuals (UHNWIs), had less than 100,000 individuals with assets amounting to ** million U.S. dollars or more.Place of residence of ultra high net worth individuals The residency of almost half of the world’s ultra high net worth individuals in the United States explains the dominance of North America in regard to the number of ultra high net worth individuals by region. Hong Kong was the city with the most UHNWIs in 2022, followed by New York, London, and Los Angeles. Source of wealth and gender differences A majority of the world's UHNWIs are self-made. However, looking at billionaires, there is a clear difference between men and women; whereas a majority of billionaire men were self-made, a majority of the women had inherited their fortune.

In 2023, the number of individuals living in the United Kingdom (UK) with a net worth of over 30 million U.S. dollars excluding the value of their primary residence was more than 23,000 people. This number is expected to grow to over 28,700 by 2028.

With a net worth of 342 billion U.S. dollars, Elon Musk, the cofounder of seven companies, such as electric car maker Tesla and the rocket producer SpaceX, was the wealthiest man in the world in March 2025. The wealthiest people in the world Marc Zuckerberg, the cofounder of Meta Platforms, came second with a wealth of 235.6 billion U.S. dollars. Amazon-founder Jeff Bezos followed in third. All the 10 richest people in the world were men. Wealth distribution worldwide As of 2022, one percent of people held nearly half of the world's combined wealth. Moreover, 2.8 billion of the world's population hold a combined wealth of less than 10,000 U.S. dollars, compared to 59 million people having a combined wealth of 1 billion dollars or more, underlining the vast inequalities around the world. Where do the most affluent people live? Most millionaires live in the United States, while Hong Konk was the city hosting the largest number of high net worth individuals worldwide. The country with the highest number of billionaires is China.

A multi-millionaire is defined as someone owning 10 million U.S. dollars or more. It was forecasted that there would be almost 18 thousand individuals in Australia defined as multi-millionaires by 2026. This is in line with the country’s growing economy over the years as well as the growing wealth inequality that was becoming a cause for concern in the island nation.

Distribution of the wealthy

As a rich country with plenty of natural resources and a high Human Development Index, Australia had always had a large number of high net-worth individuals or HNWIs. There were over ten thousand millionaires including a couple dozen of billionaires, with these figures expected to grow significantly over the next few years.

Income inequality

Despite the increase of wealth and economic growth, there was a concern at the level of poverty and homelessness due to the rising wealth inequality nationally. The number of homeless people living in Australia had only been increasing with more than a hundred thousand people currently without shelter. Furthermore, most of the wealth was being pushed from the country to the cities, affecting the livelihood of those living in the countryside or outback.

According to the Hurun Global Rich List 2025, the United States housed the highest number of billionaires worldwide in 2025. In detail, there were *** billionaires living in the United States as of January that year. By comparison, *** billionaires resided in China. India, the United Kingdom, and Germany were also the homes of a significant number of billionaires that year. United States has regained its first place As the founder and exporter of consumer capitalism, it is no surprise that the United States is home to a large number of billionaires. Although China had briefly overtaken the U.S. in recent years, the United States has reclaimed its position as the country with the most billionaires in the world. Moreover, North America leads the way in terms of the highest number of ultra high net worth individuals – those with a net worth of more than ***** million U.S. dollars. The prominence of Europe and North America is a reflection of the higher degree of economic development in those states. However, this may also change as China and other emerging economies continue developing. Female billionaires Moreover, the small proportion of female billionaires does little to counter critics claiming the global economy is dominated by an elite comprised mainly of men. On the list of the 20 richest people in the world, only one was a woman. Moreover, recent political discourse has put a great amount of attention on the wealth held by the super-rich with the wealth distribution of the global population being heavily unequal.

Iceland was the country with the highest rate of millionaires worldwide in 2022, with more than ***percent of the adult population owning assets worth more than one million U.S. dollars. Luxembourg followed behind with ** percent of the population being millionaires, with Switzerland in third.

In the first quarter of 2024, almost two-thirds percent of the total wealth in the United States was owned by the top 10 percent of earners. In comparison, the lowest 50 percent of earners only owned 2.5 percent of the total wealth. Income inequality in the U.S. Despite the idea that the United States is a country where hard work and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps will inevitably lead to success, this is often not the case. In 2023, 7.4 percent of U.S. households had an annual income under 15,000 U.S. dollars. With such a small percentage of people in the United States owning such a vast majority of the country’s wealth, the gap between the rich and poor in America remains stark. The top one percent The United States follows closely behind China as the country with the most billionaires in the world. Elon Musk alone held around 219 billion U.S. dollars in 2022. Over the past 50 years, the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio has exploded, causing the gap between rich and poor to grow, with some economists theorizing that this gap is the largest it has been since right before the Great Depression.

In 2016, there were approximately 19.2 thousand millionaires in Pakistan. The number of individuals owning one million U.S. dollars or more in Pakistan is expected to rise to 26.9 thousand by 2026.

HNWI forecast in Pakistan

Individuals with investible assets of at least one million U.S. dollars in current exchange rate terms are considered high net worth. The number of high-net-worth individuals in Pakistan is expected to rise overall between 2022 and 2028, settling at just under eight thousand individuals.

Countries with the highest millionaire rate

In 2021, Switzerland had the highest rate of millionaires in the world, with 16.4 percent of the adult population owning assets worth more than one million U.S. dollars. Luxembourg came in second, with 16.2 percent of the population being millionaires, and Iceland came in third. Furthermore, over 22 million people in the United States were among the world's top one percent of ultra-high net-worth individuals in 2021. China came second, with over five million top one percent wealth holders worldwide.

In 2023, there were over ** thousand ultra-high-net-worth individuals (UHNWI) in India. Individuals owning assets worth more than ** million U.S. dollars were considered to be UHNWI. These figures were expected to reach about ** thousand UHNWI by 2028.

In 2020, Italy counted approximately 1.2 million individuals boasting a wealth worth over one million U.S. dollars. Individuals in this wealth bracket are forecasted to reach nearly two million in 2025, an increase of approximately 63 percent compared to 2020. When compared to other Western European countries, the number of individuals worth over five million U.S. dollars is less impressive. France, for example, counted about 2.1 million individuals in that wealth bracket in 2019.

Wealthiest individuals in Italy

In 2019, Giovanni Ferrero, the CEO of the Italian confectionary company Ferrero S.p.A., lead the ranking of the wealthiest individuals in Italy published yearly by Forbes. With a total net worth estimated at 22.4 billion U.S. dollars, Ferrero overshadowed Leonardo Del Vecchio, founder of Luxottica, whose fortune amounted to 19.8 U.S. dollars.

Wealthiest individuals in the world

According to the Forbes’ ranking, in 2019, Giovanni Ferrero was the 33th wealthiest person in the world and Leonardo Del Vecchio ranked 41th in the list. Despite their massive fortune, no one can compete with Jeff Bezos. For the second year in a row, the founder of Amazon dominated the Forbes’ ranking: his wealth was estimated at over 131 billion dollars in 2019.

As of March 2025, Alice Walton was ranked the richest woman with over 97 billion U.S. dollars in net worth. By comparison, the richest man in the world had a fortune of over 328 billion dollars as of March 2025. The philanthropy of MacKenzie Scott MacKenzie Scott has become well known in the world of philanthropy for providing billions to thousands of non-profit organizations. Globally, the United States has the most philanthropic outflows out of any nation, reaching nearly 49 billion U.S. dollars in 2020. By comparison, the country with the second highest philanthropic outflows, the United Kingdom, reached nearly 5.9 billion U.S. dollars in 2020. Across the United States, basic needs, religious and spiritual causes, and healthcare are the sectors affluent individuals have given the most. Wealth in the United States Out of each country, the United States has the most people within the top one percent of ultra-high-net-worth individuals globally, with 21 million residents belonging to this group. By comparison, China ranked second with over five million belonging to the top one percent of ultra-high net worth individuals. Regionally, North America has the most billionaires, reaching over 1,100 followed by Europe and Asia.

As of April 2025, Elon Musk was estimated as the wealthiest person in the United States with a net worth of around 342 billion dollars. Richest people in the United States - additional information Every year since 1982, the American business magazine Forbes has been compiling lists of the 400 richest people in the United States, known as the “Forbes 400.” In addition to that, since 1987, the publication has also been compiling a ranking of the 500 richest people in the world (excluding royalty and dictators), as well as more specialized tops, such as “World's Most Powerful Women,” “America's Richest Families,” “Most Valuable Brands” or “30 Under 30,” which focuses on young entrepreneurs from various fields which have gained millions in the past year by the use of social media, technical innovations and generally new and fresh approaches to business.