The Million Dollar Question: As of the most recent 2025/2026 data, how many dollar millionaires are there in the world?
Read on for the answer.
Three organizations currently publish a global millionaire count for roughly the same year, and the three numbers span more than 41 million people. Nobody is wrong. They are counting different things and calling all of it “millionaires.”
What it is
“How many millionaires are in the world” sounds like a question with one answer, the way “how many people live in Japan” does. It isn’t, for the same reason the US-only version of this question isn’t: the word “millionaire” was never attached to a single, agreed definition. Three choices do almost all the work in deciding which number you get.
Total net worth versus investable assets. Does a paid-off house count toward the million, or only money that could actually be moved into a brokerage account tomorrow?
Measured versus modeled. Did a researcher actually survey real people and ask what they own, or build a statistical estimate from aggregate national wealth data and a handful of anchor points?
How much of the world the count actually covers. A report built from 56 national datasets is describing a different, larger world than one built from 27.
At the global level, a fourth variable pushes the number around in a way the US-only count never has to deal with: currency conversion. Every one of these reports states its totals in US dollars, which means a weak dollar year — like 2025, when the euro rose almost 9% against it — can inflate the reported wealth of millions of non-US households without a single one of them getting any richer in their own currency. Hold that in mind for every year-over-year “X million new millionaires” headline that follows.
It’s also a question people ask constantly without expecting three different right answers: “how many millionaires in the world” draws thousands of searches a month on its own, with “countries with the most millionaires” and “cities with the most millionaires” close behind. Almost nobody searching it realizes they’re about to land on a UBS page, a Capgemini page, or a Henley page that each answer a slightly different question — and report a number that can look, at first glance, like it contradicts the other two.
Who’s counting, and why
Three organizations publish a global count, and each one built its number for a different customer.
UBS publishes the Global Wealth Report every year — now in its 17th edition, covering 56 markets that UBS estimates represent more than 92% of global wealth. UBS’s audience is global private banking and policy research, and its count is deliberately the broadest available: total net worth, one adult at a time, home equity included. The 2026 edition puts the world’s millionaire population at roughly 57.5 million, up 1.5% in 2025 — close to one million new millionaires globally, at a pace of roughly 2,680 a day.
Capgemini publishes the World Wealth Report, now in its 30th edition — the private-banking industry’s long-running benchmark, built for institutions deciding where to put advisors and branches. Capgemini counts high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) on an investable-assets basis: at least $1 million, excluding the primary residence, collectibles, and consumer durables — the kind of money a bank can actually manage. Its 2026 edition puts the global HNWI population at 25.3 million, up nearly 2 million over 2025, holding a record $98.3 trillion.
Henley & Partners, through its New World Wealth research arm, takes the narrowest and most geographically specific approach of the three. Its Wealthiest Cities 2025 report and its country-level wealth reports serve the residence-and-citizenship-by-investment industry — a business that needs to know how many people, specifically, have liquid wealth sitting around to deploy into a second passport or a residency program. Its companion US figure, 6.04 million, is reported as 37% of the world’s millionaire population on Henley’s count — which implies a global Henley total near 16.3 million, though Henley does not publish that world figure as a single headline number the way UBS and Capgemini do.
Why the counts differ
Line the three up and the 41-million-person gap stops looking mysterious.
Home equity in or out. UBS counts the house. Capgemini and Henley both strip it out. For most millionaire-adjacent households below the $5 million mark, the primary residence is the largest single asset on the balance sheet, so removing it knocks tens of millions of people out of the count worldwide — not because their wealth changed, but because the ruler changed.
Currency and market coverage. UBS’s 56-market model and Capgemini’s 27-market survey simply don’t cover the same slice of the planet, and both report in US dollars. A year in which the dollar weakens against other major currencies — as it did through 2025 — mechanically inflates every non-US total measured in dollars, which is part of why “nearly one million new millionaires” is as much a currency story as a wealth-creation one.
Measured versus modeled, again. Capgemini’s number comes closest to an actual survey: its 2026 report is built on interviews with 6,510 HNWIs across 27 markets, plus more than 1,400 wealth-management executives and relationship managers. UBS instead starts from macro-level national wealth totals — central-bank and national-accounts data on a country’s total wealth — then distributes that total across the population using a statistical model calibrated against external anchor points like the Forbes billionaire list. New World Wealth, behind Henley’s reports, runs its own proprietary individual-level database, built and maintained in-house; none of the three publishes its full methodology for outside audit.
How the counting actually works
UBS’s model doesn’t interview anyone. It takes a country’s total household wealth from national accounts and central-bank balance-sheet data, then fits a statistical distribution across the adult population that matches known reference points — the number and fortunes of that country’s billionaires, for instance, which UBS tracks separately and put at 3,302 globally in the 2026 report, up 383 individuals (+13.1%) over the year. The millionaire count is the share of that modeled distribution sitting above $1 million once converted to US dollars.
Capgemini runs an actual field survey: 6,510 individual HNWI interviews across 27 markets, cross-checked against proprietary analytics Capgemini has run for three decades, with wealth-management executives and client-facing relationship managers interviewed separately to sanity-check the trends. It’s a real survey with real sampling considerations, closer in spirit to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances than to a pure model — except built for a bank’s planning needs rather than academic research.
New World Wealth, which supplies the figures behind every Henley & Partners wealth report, tracks individual-level wealth data rather than modeling a national aggregate — the kind of work that lets it publish which specific cities (not just countries) a millionaire lives in. Like Capgemini, it doesn’t publish its full methodology for outside review, so its figures are best treated as a serious, directionally reliable estimate rather than an audited count.
What the numbers actually are
Put the three headline totals side by side, for the same roughly 2025–2026 reporting window:
| Source | What it counts | Home equity? | Market coverage | Global total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| UBS Global Wealth Report 2026 | Total net worth | Included | 56 markets | ~57.5 million |
| Capgemini World Wealth Report 2026 | Investable assets ≥ $1M | Excluded | 27 markets (surveyed) | 25.3 million |
| Henley & Partners / New World Wealth | Investable/liquid wealth ≥ $1M | Excluded | Global (city + country level) | ~16.3 million (implied from the 37% US share Henley reports, not a published headline figure) |
The top countries, per UBS Global Wealth Report 2026 country data:
| Rank | Country | Millionaires |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | United States | ~23,627,000 |
| 2 | China | ~5,305,000 |
| 3 | Japan | ~2,902,000 |
| 4 | Germany | ~2,648,000 |
| 5 | United Kingdom | ~2,428,000 |
| 6 | France | ~2,388,000 |
| 7 | Canada | ~2,098,000 |
| 8 | Australia | ~1,634,000 |
| 9 | South Korea | ~1,317,000 |
| 10 | Netherlands | ~1,294,000 |
The US alone holds more than 40% of UBS’s global total — and added roughly 440,000 of the world’s nearly one million new millionaires in 2025, close to half the global increase on its own.
Country totals say nothing about where those millionaires actually live day to day, which is the gap Henley & Partners’ Wealthiest Cities 2025 report and its wider coverage fill in, using the same liquid-wealth, excludes-primary-residence definition as Henley’s country figures:
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| Rank | City | Millionaires | 10-yr growth |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | New York | 384,500 | — |
| 2 | San Francisco Bay Area | 342,400 | +98% |
| 3 | Tokyo | 292,300 | +4% |
| 4 | Singapore | 242,400 | +62% |
| 5 | Los Angeles | 220,600 | +35% |
| 6 | London | 215,700 | -12% |
| 7 | Paris | 160,100 | +5% |
| 8 | Hong Kong | 154,900 | +3% |
| 9 | Sydney | 152,900 | +28% |
| 10 | Chicago | 127,100 | +24% |
Beyond the top ten, the same data set puts Milan at 115,000, Beijing at 114,300, Shanghai at 110,500, Toronto at 108,400, Dubai at 81,200 (the fastest-growing city in the top 20, up 102% in ten years), and Zurich at 77,800. The figures are drawn from data as of the end of 2024, so they predate the United Kingdom’s April 2025 abolition of its non-domiciled tax regime — a change the next edition’s London number will almost certainly reflect more sharply than this one does.
The growth isn’t evenly spread by region, either. Capgemini’s 2026 report breaks HNWI population growth down by region for 2025: Asia-Pacific grew 9.4%, North America 9.1%, Europe 6.5%, Africa 4.1%, and Latin America essentially flat at 0.3%, while the Middle East’s HNWI population actually shrank 1.4%. That regional spread lines up with the city data above — Singapore and Dubai are the fastest-growing cities in the top 20 (+62% and +102% over ten years, respectively), while no major Middle Eastern or Latin American city cracks the top ten at all. A country or city can add millionaires fast without ever showing up in the country-level top ten, and a country can rank highly on the UBS or Capgemini list while individual cities within it grow unevenly — Shanghai and Beijing both post well over 100,000 resident millionaires despite China’s overall HNWI growth (Capgemini) lagging the regional Asia-Pacific average.
Hidden costs and tradeoffs
Treating any one of these three totals as the number creates real problems, because each was built to answer a different question.
Global-inequality and policy arguments lean on UBS, because it’s the broadest and most internationally comparable count available, and because UBS’s report also tracks median wealth, which fell in most countries tracked even as the millionaire count rose — a split the report itself frames as evidence of concentration at the top rather than broad-based gains.
Private banks and wealth managers lean on Capgemini, because “how much investable money is out there for us to manage” is the only question their business actually needs answered, and a paid-off house doesn’t move that number no matter whose balance sheet it sits on.
The residence-and-citizenship industry leans on Henley and New World Wealth, because its business depends entirely on people who have liquid wealth sitting around to deploy into a program — a millionaire whose net worth is entirely home equity in Shanghai can’t fund a residency application with it.
The currency effect compounds all three. A dollar that weakens against the euro, the pound, or the yen mechanically inflates every non-US total reported in dollars that year, which means some real share of “nearly one million new millionaires globally” in 2025 reflects exchange rates moving, not wealth being created — a distinction almost no headline repeating that figure bothers to make.
What people get wrong
That there’s one official world millionaire count. There isn’t, for the same reason there’s no single US figure. UBS, Capgemini, and Henley/New World Wealth each publish a real, defensible number, and none of the three is more “official” than the others.
That growth rates are comparable across reports. UBS’s “nearly one million new millionaires” and Capgemini’s “up nearly two million HNWIs” describe different-sized, differently-defined populations. Treating their percentage changes as measuring the same underlying group is a category error, even though both figures are accurate on their own terms.
That the world’s millionaires are overwhelmingly American. True by UBS’s broad count (over 40%), but the share shrinks fast under narrower definitions, and the city data complicates it further — four of the top ten wealthiest cities (Tokyo, Singapore, London, Hong Kong) sit outside the US entirely, and the fastest-growing cities in the top twenty are Dubai and the San Francisco Bay Area, not a cluster of American coastal cities broadly.
That a city’s millionaire count predicts its billionaire count. It doesn’t track cleanly. Beijing and Shanghai post six-figure millionaire populations with dozens of billionaires apiece, while a comparably sized millionaire population in a European or Australian city can sit well below that on the billionaire count — the depth of a city’s deepest fortunes and the breadth of its ordinary-millionaire population are genuinely different measurements, both real, both worth knowing separately.
That a city falling in the rankings means its wealthy residents are leaving. London’s ten-year decline (-12%) partly reflects exactly that, but the Henley/New World Wealth data used here stops at the end of 2024 — before the UK’s April 2025 non-dom tax change took effect. The real post-2025 move, whichever direction it goes, isn’t in these numbers yet.
Bottom line
D. All three numbers — roughly 16.3 million (Henley/New World Wealth, liquid wealth, narrowest), 25.3 million (Capgemini, investable assets), and 57.5 million (UBS, total net worth including the house) — are current, real, and published by serious organizations for the same approximate period. None of them is lying and none of them is “the” count; each measures a genuinely different population, built for a genuinely different customer. The honest answer to “how many millionaires are in the world” isn’t a number. It’s “tell me which million-dollar ruler you want to use, and I’ll give you the number that goes with it.”
Related reading:
– How Many Millionaires Are in America
– How Many Billionaires Are in America
– Asian and Gulf Wealth
– The States With the Most Millionaires
– How Much Is a Billion Dollars?
