The richest 1.5 percent of the world’s adults, everyone holding more than $1 million, owned 48.4 percent of all global wealth in 2025, roughly $251 trillion, according to the UBS Global Wealth Report. At the other end, adults with less than $10,000 make up 42.1 percent of the world’s population and hold under 1 percent of its wealth.
Wealth is not income, and the difference matters. The International Association for Research in Income and Wealth says the world distribution of wealth is “much more unequal” than that of income. Wealth means net worth: what you own, minus what you owe. Income is what comes in this year.
Think of it like the gap between a pay stub and a lifetime photo album of everything you own. The pay stub changes. The album sticks.
How the top pulls away
The numbers climb fast near the summit. The 2026 World Inequality Report found that the wealthiest 0.001 percent, around 56,000 multi-millionaires, hold three times the wealth of the bottom half of humanity. Their share rose from 3.7 percent in 1995 to 6.1 percent in 2025.
Earlier counts told a similar story. A UN University study reported that the richest 10 percent of adults accounted for 85 percent of world wealth in 2000, while the bottom half owned 1 percent. In many societies, the richest tenth of households control more than half of all wealth.
The United States is the extreme case among rich countries. OECD figures show its top 1 percent holds 40.5 percent of national wealth. No other industrial nation tops 27.1 percent. A US household needs at least $5.8 million to join the top 1 percent, per the Knight Frank Wealth Report, which is 5.4 times the bar in China and 1.5 times the one in Germany.
Why a big paycheck is not the same as being wealthy
Here is the practical upshot. Change in wealth equals saving, and saving is income minus spending. Someone earning a lot who spends a lot can end up with little to show for it, or even negative net worth.
Workers have had a rough few years on that front. Oxfam and the International Trade Union Confederation found that real wages worldwide fell 12 percent between 2019 and 2025, about $2,326. Pay for the 1,500 best-paid CEOs rose 54 percent over the same stretch, to an average of $8.4 million.
Economists sometimes plot all this as a “wealth over people” curve, lining households up from richest to poorest. The curve’s far right end sits at zero wealth by definition.
