On paper, 2025 was a spectacular year to be alive, personal wealth around the world climbed at its fastest clip since 2017, due to roaring stock markets and soaring asset prices. But peel back the headline number, there is an interesting story.
According to UBS’s latest Global Wealth Report, most of that windfall never reached ordinary households at all. It piled up at the very top.
The bank’s figures put global personal wealth growth at 10.8% in dollar terms last year, more than double the pace of 2024, and the third consecutive year of expansion.
Growth was strongest in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, at 17.5%, with the Americas up 8.5% and Asia-Pacific climbing 5.9%. A weaker US dollar exaggerated much of the gain outside the United States, but the trend was that the world, on average, got richer.
The gap between average and median wealth shows how uneven wealth creation has become. Globally, wealth continued to rise in 2025, but the gains were concentrated among the richest households, leaving the typical person with far smaller gains. The United States best illustrates this divide. It ranks second in the world in average wealth per adult at $696,277, but only 28th in median wealth at $68,998.
Between 2020 and 2025, average wealth per adult in the US increased 10%, while median wealth per adult fell 20%, indicating that wealth growth has largely accrued to the top end of the population. Switzerland topped the global rankings for average wealth per adult at $910,382, followed by the US and Luxembourg, while Luxembourg ranked first in median wealth at $394,005, ahead of Belgium ($277,166) and Australia ($210,783). UBS notes that average wealth can be skewed by a small number of ultra-rich individuals, whereas median wealth offers a better picture of what a typical adult owns.
Two numbers, one major gap
Wealth is not distributed evenly, it never is. But when a small number of extremely wealthy people gain enormous sums, they can single-handedly drag the national average upward, making an entire country look more prosperous than the typical resident actually experiences.
Nowhere is that distortion clearer than in the United States. Americans rank second in the world for average wealth per adult, at $696,277. But on median wealth, the figure that represents the person literally in the middle of the distribution, the US falls to 28th place, at just $68,998.
Between 2020 and 2025, average wealth per American adult rose 10%. Median wealth, over the same stretch, fell 20%. The US now ranks sixth globally for wealth inequality.
Where the money actually went
UBS found that the fastest-growing wealth bracket in 2025 was not the middle class, it was people already sitting on somewhere between $5 million and $100 million, with the sharpest gains concentrated in mainland China, Australia and the United States.
The mechanism is straightforward. Wealthy households tend to hold a much larger share of their assets in stocks and other investments, so when markets surge, they show a disproportionate share of the upside.
Middle-income families, by contrast, typically hold most of what they own in their homes, an asset that simply does not move the same way. Even though ordinary investors have gained somewhat greater access to markets over the past decade, that access remains far from equal, which means future booms are likely to increase the gap further rather than close it.
A K-shaped world
Economists have a name for this pattern, a K-shaped economy, in which asset-owning households keep climbing while everyone else contends with a rising cost of living. Buoyant markets have kept lifting the fortunes of investors even as inflation eats into the budgets of families with little in savings or investments to fall back on. The result has been mounting public frustration over inequality and sharpened scrutiny of the world’s billionaires, whose fortunes have continued to expand largely untouched by the pressures squeezing everyone else.