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Global wealth had a remarkable year in 2025.
According to the UBS Global Wealth Report 2026, total personal wealth across the report's 56 markets—which together represent more than 92% of global wealth—rose by 10.8% in USD terms. This marked a third consecutive year of expansion and a growth rate more than twice those recorded in 2024 (4.6%) and 2023 (4.2%). Strong financial markets, a recovery in non-financial assets, and favorable currency movements helped drive the increase, while nearly one million people joined the ranks of USD millionaires.
Those headline numbers tell only part of the story.
The report reveals a more nuanced picture of global prosperity. Average wealth increased, yet median wealth declined in most markets. Over the current decade, fewer than half of the markets in the UBS sample recorded higher median wealth than at the start of the decade, and 20 markets experienced declines of more than 10% in real median wealth.
That distinction matters.
Average wealth is heavily influenced by gains at the very top of the distribution, while median wealth better reflects the financial position of the typical adult. UBS describes the widening gap between rising averages and falling medians as evidence of a growing divide between the wealthiest households and the broader population.
In other words, the world became wealthier, but not everyone became more financially secure.
The report therefore raises a broader question than simply who became richer. It asks what characteristics make wealth economically resilient and capable of supporting future prosperity.
The next phase of global wealth creation may depend less on headline asset values and more on four structural questions:
- Is wealth liquid?
- Does it preserve purchasing power?
- Is it supported by human capital?
- Can it be redirected toward the next generation of innovation beyond today's AI investment cycle?
The headline is growth.
The deeper story is the quality of that growth.
Strong regional growth—but not all of it reflects stronger economies
Regional performance appears impressive at first glance.
On a population-weighted basis, personal wealth rose by 17.5% in EMEA, compared with 8.5% in the Americas and 5.9% in APAC during 2025. Within Europe, Western Europe grew by 16.8%, while Eastern Europe expanded by 28.3% in USD terms.
The United States remained the world's largest center of private wealth within the UBS sample, accounting for 35.7% of measured personal wealth and home to more than 23.6 million USD millionaires.
These figures are important, but they require careful interpretation.
A significant share of Europe's apparent outperformance resulted from exchange-rate movements rather than stronger underlying economic performance. UBS calculates wealth in US dollars using year-end exchange rates, and during 2025 the euro appreciated by almost 9% against the US dollar. That appreciation increased the reported USD value of euro-denominated assets even when their local-currency value changed far less.
APAC's relatively weaker performance does not necessarily indicate declining economic importance. Currency movements and financial-market performance also influenced the region's results, making direct USD comparisons an incomplete measure of underlying economic strength.
This illustrates one of the report's most important methodological points.
USD-denominated wealth comparisons are extremely useful when evaluating cross-border capital flows, international acquisitions, globally managed private wealth, and luxury markets. However, they do not fully describe financial resilience within domestic economies.
A household's reported net worth does not automatically reveal how much that wealth can actually buy, how easily it can be converted into investable capital, or how effectively it supports long-term financial security.
Purchasing power is the missing layer
The report explicitly acknowledges an important limitation: its wealth statistics do not measure purchasing power.
Nominal USD wealth makes international comparisons possible, but it does not capture differences in local prices, taxation, housing costs, healthcare expenses, or the overall cost of living. Two households with identical wealth measured in US dollars may enjoy very different standards of living depending on where they live.
This distinction becomes increasingly important when evaluating markets rather than simply comparing balance sheets.
A country may appear substantially wealthier in USD terms while offering weaker domestic purchasing power. Conversely, another country may rank lower in global wealth tables while still supporting stronger local consumer demand because everyday costs are significantly lower.
For investors, businesses, and policymakers, the distinction has practical consequences.
Purchasing power influences premium pricing, market-entry decisions, domestic consumption, relocation economics, and long-term capital formation. Yet it remains outside the scope of the report's core wealth calculations.
Rather than contradicting the report's findings, purchasing power adds another analytical layer. Wealth measured in dollars shows how economies compare globally. Purchasing power helps explain how that wealth functions within each economy.
Together, they provide a much more complete picture of economic resilience than either measure alone.
Liquidity is becoming a key dividing line
One of the report's most valuable distinctions is the difference between net worth and investable wealth.
Crossing the USD 1 million threshold does not necessarily mean having one million dollars available to invest.
For many households—particularly those in UBS's "everyday millionaire" segment (USD 1 million to USD 5 million)—owner-occupied housing remains the largest asset. Rising property values can lift households into millionaire status without increasing their income or giving them substantially more capital that can be deployed elsewhere.
In other words, higher net worth does not always translate into greater financial flexibility.
This distinction becomes much clearer when comparing countries.
The United States has a significant liquidity advantage because a much larger share of household wealth is held in financial assets rather than real estate. According to UBS, 78.9% of gross personal wealth in the United States consists of financial assets, including private pension assets but excluding unfunded state pension entitlements.
More importantly, UBS estimates that 47% of US net wealth is liquid. Its definition includes cash, bank deposits, voluntary pension savings, collective investment schemes, and directly held securities.
Liquid wealth can be reallocated quickly—to public markets, private equity, venture investments, new businesses, philanthropy, or simply retained as financial reserves during periods of uncertainty.
By contrast, wealth concentrated in residential property often provides stability but considerably less flexibility. Selling or borrowing against a home is slower, more expensive, and usually less practical than reallocating financial assets.
As a result, households and financial systems in two countries with similar average net worth may have very different levels of flexibility when responding to economic shocks or allocating capital to investment and entrepreneurial activity.
The question is no longer simply how much wealth exists.
Increasingly, it is how quickly that wealth can move.
Human capital remains a central engine of long-term prosperity
Perhaps the report's most important strategic insight appears outside the wealth statistics themselves.
In an interview included in the report, Nobel laureate Joel Mokyr argues that long-term prosperity depends less on accumulated capital than on human capital—the skills, knowledge, technical capability, and institutional capacity needed to transform ideas into productive economic systems.
Financial capital is relatively easy to measure. Human capital is not.
Balance sheets record assets. They do not capture engineering talent, scientific expertise, manufacturing capability, research ecosystems, or the institutional knowledge required to turn inventions into scalable industries.
In well-functioning markets, financial capital often becomes available when opportunities are sufficiently compelling.
The more difficult constraint is finding enough people who can design, build, operate, improve, and continuously adapt increasingly complex technologies.
That distinction becomes particularly important as AI moves from experimentation toward widespread deployment.
Artificial intelligence has the potential to improve productivity across much of the economy. At the same time, the report notes that it can also concentrate gains among asset owners and highly skilled workers if technical capability does not expand broadly enough.
In that scenario, economies may continue creating wealth while becoming less resilient.
Economic growth would increasingly depend on a relatively small group of organizations and individuals capable of developing, deploying, and benefiting from advanced technologies.
Human capital also changes how we should evaluate countries.
A nation with substantial accumulated wealth but limited technical capability may appear exceptionally strong today while becoming more vulnerable over time.
Conversely, a country with less visible private wealth but a deep base of engineers, scientists, researchers, advanced manufacturers, and technical institutions may be better positioned for sustained prosperity over the coming decades.
Capital can be transferred almost instantly across borders.
Building human capability takes years.
Education systems, research institutions, industrial ecosystems, and accumulated technical knowledge compound gradually, making them much harder to replicate than financial capital.
That is why the long-term competitive advantage increasingly belongs not only to markets with abundant capital, but also to those capable of continuously producing the talent required to convert that capital into future economic growth.
The next innovation cycle may extend beyond AI
Artificial intelligence is receiving most of the attention, understandably. But the UBS report points to a broader innovation horizon.
In its interview with Nobel laureate Joel Mokyr, the report highlights potential advances in nuclear fusion, mRNA technology, and rejuvenation research. These are not established forecasts, but they illustrate how future wealth creation may emerge from fields that look very different from today’s software-led investment cycle.
They also require a different kind of capital.
Some software-based AI products can be developed and scaled relatively quickly. By contrast, fusion, biotechnology, and longevity research depend on deeper scientific expertise, longer development timelines, substantial physical infrastructure, and more extensive regulatory oversight.
Commercially scalable fusion could significantly change the economics of energy. It could affect industrial geography, manufacturing costs, data infrastructure, and climate-transition strategies. Greater energy abundance would not only reduce some costs; it could also remove constraints that currently limit energy-intensive industries.
mRNA technology points toward a more programmable approach to some forms of medicine. Its significance may extend well beyond vaccine development to changes in how treatments are researched, manufactured, and personalized.
If these applications scale successfully, they could improve pharmaceutical research productivity and reshape parts of healthcare delivery. They could also influence insurance markets, public-health systems, and long-term population health.
Rejuvenation research remains far more speculative. However, materially longer healthy lives would have consequences well beyond healthcare.
They could change retirement patterns, labor supply, pension assumptions, insurance models, inheritance timing, and the length of time wealth remains within one generation. The economic effects would depend not only on whether people live longer, but on whether they remain healthy and economically active for longer.
These possibilities do not tell us which technology will drive the next major wave of wealth creation.
They do show why long-term investment strategies should not assume that the current AI-centered cycle represents the entire innovation landscape.
The next major sources of value may emerge from energy, biology, and longevity—fields that require more patient capital, stronger institutions, and highly specialized human capability.
Art reveals the non-financial logic of wealth preservation
The report’s discussion of art may initially appear secondary to its broader analysis of global wealth. In fact, it reveals an important difference between how wealth is measured and how wealthy individuals choose to preserve it.
According to the Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2025, which surveyed 3,100 high-net-worth collectors across 10 markets, respondents held an average of 20% of their wealth in art.
Among respondents with more than USD 50 million, the average allocation rose to 28%.
These figures should not be interpreted as representative of every high-net-worth individual. The survey focuses on collectors, who are naturally more likely than the broader wealthy population to hold significant art assets.
Even so, the stability of these allocations is notable.
UBS reports that art holdings in 2025 remained broadly in line with levels recorded over the previous six years, despite geopolitical tension, economic uncertainty, and increasingly fragmented markets.
Art is not an obvious defensive asset.
It is illiquid, difficult to value, expensive to transact, and often dependent on provenance, specialist knowledge, and a relatively small group of buyers. Its price can also be influenced by fashion, reputation, and changing cultural preferences.
Yet it continues to occupy a meaningful place in the wealth structures of the collectors surveyed.
That persistence suggests that not all wealth is allocated primarily for yield, liquidity, or short-term market performance.
Some assets are also held for identity, legacy, scarcity, cultural significance, and intergenerational continuity.
Art can function simultaneously as an investment, a cultural object, a status symbol, and a store of value. For some collectors, it may also provide diversification because its value is shaped by different market mechanisms and does not necessarily move in line with public equities or bonds.
This does not make art inherently stable or low-risk.
It shows that wealth preservation at the top end follows a broader logic than financial optimization alone.
For wealthy households, preserving capital may also mean preserving memory, status, cultural identity, and assets intended to outlast the current market cycle.
The wealth pyramid is changing, but wealth remains concentrated
The structure of global wealth is gradually changing.
Within the 56 markets covered by UBS, 42.1% of adults hold less than USD 10,000 in wealth, while 41.1% hold between USD 10,000 and USD 100,000.
UBS notes that if current trends continue, the second group may become larger than the lowest wealth band before the end of the decade.
That would represent meaningful progress.
A larger share of adults would be moving beyond the lowest nominal wealth category, suggesting that the base of the global wealth pyramid is becoming broader.
However, the improvement should be interpreted carefully.
Movement into a higher USD wealth band can reflect genuine asset accumulation, but it can also be influenced by inflation, exchange rates, and rising property or financial-asset prices. UBS itself notes that the progress appears more muted after adjusting for inflation.
The distinction between average and median wealth is especially important here.
Average wealth rose in 2025, but median wealth declined in most markets. From 2020 to 2025, fewer than half of the markets in the UBS sample recorded an increase in real median wealth, while 20 markets experienced declines of more than 10%.
This suggests that the strong headline growth was not evenly distributed.
Average figures can rise rapidly when gains are concentrated among the wealthiest households. Median wealth provides a clearer picture of what is happening near the middle of the distribution.
The divergence between the two measures points to a broader pattern: more adults may be moving beyond the lowest wealth category, while the largest gains continue to accumulate at the top.
Wealth remains highly concentrated.
UBS estimates that only 1.5% of adults hold more than USD 1 million. The global billionaire population reached 3,302, an increase of 383 people, or 13.1%, from the previous year.
On average, billionaires’ wealth rose by close to 25% between April 2025 and April 2026. This average should be distinguished from changes in collective billionaire wealth, which can also rise when more people enter the billionaire category.
The segment with net assets between USD 5 million and USD 100 million now includes approximately seven million adults globally, with more than four million in the United States alone.
Since 2000, the collective wealth of adults with more than USD 5 million in net assets has grown at a compound annual rate of 8.7% in nominal terms and 6.1% after inflation.
Together, these trends create a two-tier pattern.
The distribution across the two lowest nominal wealth bands is gradually shifting upward, but the wealthiest groups still control a disproportionate share of the capital available for major investments, business ownership, philanthropy, and intergenerational transfers.
The top still holds most of the power to allocate capital.
Private wealth is becoming more politically visible
Private wealth is also becoming more prominent in public policy debates.
UBS notes that government debt ratios remain below their historical peaks but above levels seen in the more recent past. At the same time, the Great Wealth Transfer is drawing greater political attention, while wealth inequality has become more visible.
Differences in wealth that were once less visible are now displayed more openly through property, travel, consumption, and lifestyle. That visibility can influence public attitudes toward taxation, fairness, and the responsibilities of wealthy individuals and institutions.
These conditions are increasing scrutiny of inheritance, wealth taxation, beneficial ownership, cross-border reporting, and anti-avoidance measures.
The scale and direction of policy changes will vary across jurisdictions. Some governments may focus on inheritance rules. Others may tighten disclosure requirements, expand reporting obligations, or increase enforcement against tax avoidance.
But the general direction is clear: private wealth is becoming a more important subject of public policy.
The issue is not limited to taxation.
As wealth becomes more concentrated, mobile, and visible, wealthy individuals and the institutions managing their assets may face stronger expectations regarding transparency, taxation, philanthropy, and responsible governance.
This creates a new strategic dimension for private wealth.
Managing assets is no longer only about returns, preservation, and succession. It increasingly involves navigating public scrutiny, regulatory change, and reputational risk.
For family offices, private banks, asset managers, and wealthy households, governance may become as important as investment performance.
Strategic implications
The UBS report reframes wealth from a single number into a broader system.
The first shift is from nominal wealth to usable wealth.
Headline asset values matter, but they do not reveal whether wealth is liquid, whether it preserves purchasing power, or whether it can be redirected toward productive investment.
The second shift is from asset accumulation to capability formation.
Financial capital can move quickly across markets and borders. Human capital cannot. Skills, technical expertise, research institutions, and industrial capability take years to build and are therefore more difficult to replicate.
The third shift is from a narrow focus on AI to a broader innovation horizon.
AI may remain the dominant investment theme in the near term, but fusion, mRNA, longevity research, and other science-intensive fields could shape future wealth creation. These sectors require patient capital, specialized talent, physical infrastructure, and stronger regulatory systems.
The fourth shift is from private wealth as a personal balance sheet to private wealth as a public-policy issue.
High government debt, visible inequality, and large intergenerational transfers are increasing political attention to how wealth is accumulated, transferred, disclosed, and governed.
The strongest long-term position may therefore belong to markets and institutions that can do more than create nominal wealth.
They must also be able to convert it into productive investment, preserve its real value, maintain sufficient liquidity, and support the human capability required for future growth.
That is the deeper message of the report.
The world continues to create wealth.
The harder question is whether that wealth is becoming more resilient, more broadly distributed, and better able to finance the next stage of prosperity.
