The States With the Most Millionaires — and the Richest States, Measured Properly
The Million Dollar Question: Which U.S. state has the most billionaires per capita — more than California or New York?
A) California B) New York C) Wyoming D) ConnecticutRead on for the answer.
Ask “which state is the richest?” and you’ll get a confident answer — and then get a completely different confident answer if you ask again using a different measure. Rank states by median household income and Massachusetts wins. Rank them by the share of households that qualify as millionaires and New Jersey wins. Rank them by billionaire headcount and California wins by a mile — unless you adjust for population, in which case a state with under 600,000 people and a handful of ultra-wealthy trusts suddenly tops the list. None of these rankings is wrong. They’re measuring three different things, and the gaps between them say more about how American wealth actually works than any single list could.
What it is
There are three distinct, legitimate ways to rank states by wealth, and conflating them is where most “richest state” lists go wrong.
The first is median household income — the midpoint of what a typical household earns in a year, tracked annually by the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. This measures the broad middle of a state’s population, not its wealthy tail.
The second is millionaire-household density — the share of households in a state that clear roughly $1 million in investable assets, not counting the primary home. The standard source here is Phoenix Marketing International’s Wealth and Affluent Monitor, a proprietary household survey that’s tracked this state by state since the mid-2000s. This measures something closer to the mass-affluent: doctors, dual-income professionals, successful small-business owners — comfortable, not extreme.
The third is billionaire concentration — how many nine-, ten-, and eleven-figure fortunes a state is home to, tracked in Forbes’ real-time billionaires list. This measures an entirely different population: a few hundred people nationally whose wealth comes overwhelmingly from ownership stakes in specific companies, not salaries or diversified portfolios.
Each ranking answers a real question. None of them answers all three at once — which is exactly why the “richest state” keeps changing depending on who’s asking. It’s the same confusion that comes up at the neighborhood level, covered separately in our piece on the ZIP codes where the wealthy live — a $2 million median-home ZIP code and a ZIP code with three billionaire residents are not measuring the same kind of “rich,” either.
Who uses it
Each ranking has its own audience. Policymakers, economists, and local journalists lean on median income data to argue about cost-of-living adjustments, minimum-wage debates, and regional economic health — it’s the number behind most “best state to live in” rankings.
Private banks, wealth managers, and luxury retailers care far more about millionaire density, because it tells them where to put the next branch office or boutique. A state with a high share of millionaire households is a better bet for a private banking office than a state with a few enormous fortunes clustered in one city — the customer base is broader and more geographically distributed.
Political reporters, tax-policy researchers, and anyone tracking state-level wealth taxes care most about billionaire count, because that’s where the money behind state ballot initiatives and campaign contributions tends to concentrate. California’s 2026 billionaire-tax fight is a live example of why that number matters politically in a way the other two rarely do: a state can have a modest median income and an unremarkable millionaire-density ranking and still become the center of a national tax-policy fight, purely because of how many extreme fortunes happen to be headquartered there.
Site-selection consultants and real estate developers fall somewhere in between. A developer planning a new luxury condominium tower or private members’ club wants the millionaire-density number, because it predicts a deep bench of buyers; a developer courting a single marquee anchor tenant — the kind of deal that comes with a billionaire’s name attached — cares more about whether that state is already home to others like them.
Why they use it
The “why” behind each ranking comes down to what kind of decision it’s built to support. Income data is a proxy for broad economic health and purchasing power — it tells you how a typical family in a state is doing, which is useful for policy but nearly useless for identifying where the wealthy actually live.
Millionaire density is a better proxy for identifying a critical mass of comfortable-but-not-extreme wealth: enough people with $1 million-plus in investable assets to support demand for estate planning services, private schools, country club memberships, and the broader infrastructure of upper-middle-class affluence. It’s the number a financial advisory firm actually underwrites office locations against.
Billionaire count matters for an entirely different reason: concentration risk and political influence. A handful of billionaires can single-handedly shift a state’s tax base, its philanthropic landscape, and its political spending — which is why journalists track this number separately from the broader wealthy population, and why state wealth-tax fights focus on headcounts in the dozens, not percentages.
How it works
The Census Bureau’s income figure comes from the American Community Survey, an ongoing household survey that asks a representative sample of Americans to report their income directly; the Bureau then publishes state-level medians annually. The most recent release, covering 2024 and published in September 2025, put the national median household income at $81,604, with wide variation by state.
Phoenix Marketing International’s millionaire-density figure comes from a different method: a large, ongoing household panel survey that estimates investable assets (stocks, bonds, cash, and similar liquid or near-liquid holdings, excluding the primary residence) and reports what share of each state’s households crosses the $1 million threshold. Unlike the Census survey, this isn’t republished every year with fresh numbers — the most recent full state-by-state breakdown Phoenix Marketing has made public dates to year-end 2019 data, released in April 2020, and outlets citing “the latest millionaire rankings by state” as recently as 2024 were still working from that same dataset.
Forbes’ billionaire tracker works differently again. Rather than surveying households, Forbes builds individual net-worth estimates from public stock holdings, SEC filings, real estate records, and private valuations supplied by industry sources, then updates those figures continuously as markets move. It’s the only one of the three rankings that’s tracking named individuals rather than anonymized household data, which is also why it’s the only one of the three that can shift by billions of dollars in a single trading day — a 5% move in a founder’s company stock can add or subtract more from a state’s “billionaire wealth” total than an entire year of broad-based income growth would add to its median.
A state’s billionaire count can also be assigned a different way than most readers expect: Forbes attributes each billionaire to a state based on primary residence, not where their company is headquartered or incorporated. That distinction matters more than it sounds — it’s why a founder whose company is based in Silicon Valley but who has relocated to Austin or Miami shows up in Texas’s or Florida’s count, not California’s, even if every employee and every dollar of revenue is still generated in California.
What it costs — the thresholds that separate the tiers
“What it costs” to rank near the top looks different in each category. On income, the 2024 top ten ran from Massachusetts at $104,828 down to Connecticut at $96,049 — a tight band roughly 20–30% above the national median. New Jersey ($104,294), Maryland ($102,905), Hawaii ($100,745), California ($100,149), New Hampshire ($99,782), Washington ($99,389), Colorado ($97,113), and Utah ($96,658) rounded out the group, while Mississippi sat at the bottom at $59,127 — roughly 45% of Massachusetts’s figure.
On millionaire density, the 2019 Phoenix Marketing figures had New Jersey leading at 9.76% of households, followed by Maryland (9.72%), Connecticut (9.44%), Massachusetts (9.38%), and Hawaii (9.20%) — meaning in the densest state, roughly one household in ten clears the $1 million investable-assets bar, compared to a national average closer to 7–8%.
On billionaires, the gap is far more extreme. Forbes-sourced tallies compiled in 2025 put California at roughly 194–199 billionaires and New York at around 136–137, with Florida (around 116) and Texas (around 81) also running into the dozens. Illinois, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania cluster around 22 apiece; Connecticut and Nevada sit near 17; Arizona, Colorado, Tennessee, Georgia, and Washington each have a dozen or so. New Jersey — the millionaire-density leader — has only about six billionaires on the 2026 Forbes list, and at least three states (Alaska, Delaware, and West Virginia) have none at all. A single founder, or a single family like the Waltons, can move a small state’s billionaire count more than a decade of broad-based income growth could move its median.
Hidden costs and tradeoffs
The biggest distortion across all three rankings is cost of living. A $1 million investable-asset threshold is a much lower relative bar in Connecticut, where housing and services cost more, than it is in Mississippi — so millionaire-density rankings implicitly reward expensive states for simply being expensive, not necessarily for generating more real wealth. The same goes for income: Massachusetts’s $104,828 median buys less there than the same number would in a lower-cost state.
State tax policy creates a second, separate distortion that applies almost entirely to the billionaire ranking. Wyoming, Texas, Florida, and Nevada all have zero state income tax, which makes them attractive places for billionaires to establish legal domicile — the place that counts for tax purposes — independent of where they actually spend most of their time or where their companies operate. That’s a large part of why Wyoming, with under 600,000 residents, posts the highest billionaire-per-capita rate in the country: its tiny population denominator combines with trust-friendly state law to turn a handful of ultra-wealthy filers into a statistical outlier, without the state having anything resembling a visible community of resident billionaires.
Wyoming’s appeal goes beyond simply having no income tax. The state has spent two decades building some of the country’s most permissive trust and LLC statutes — allowing dynasty trusts that can run for a thousand years, strong privacy protections that keep a trust’s beneficiaries out of public records, and low-cost LLC formation — which has made it a preferred jurisdiction for housing wealth structures even for families who have never set foot in Jackson Hole. A billionaire’s trust can be domiciled in Cheyenne while the billionaire themselves lives, works, and is counted by the Census in California. Nevada and South Dakota compete for the same business with similar statutes, which is part of why both also punch above their population weight on per-capita billionaire counts.
Data staleness is the third, quieter problem, specific to the millionaire-density ranking. Because Phoenix Marketing International’s full public breakdown hasn’t been refreshed since 2019–2020 data, any list claiming to show “2026 millionaire density by state” with precise, differently-ordered percentages should be treated with real skepticism unless it names a primary, current source — several outlets have simply recycled or lightly reshuffled years-old figures under a fresh publication date.
What people get wrong
The most common mistake is assuming “richest state” is a single, stable ranking rather than three different answers to three different questions. A reader who sees New Jersey topping a millionaire list and then sees California dominating a billionaire list can come away thinking one of the two rankings must be wrong. Neither is — they’re counting different populations.
A closely related mistake is assuming coastal tech-and-finance hubs sweep every category by default. California and New York do dominate the billionaire count, but neither cracks the top five on millionaire density, where smaller, high-income Northeastern states like New Jersey, Maryland, and Connecticut consistently outrank them. Having a lot of extreme fortunes and having a high share of comfortably wealthy households turn out to be almost unrelated facts about a state.
The last mistake is treating billionaire domicile moves as if they changed something about a state’s broader wealthy population. When Jeff Bezos relocated from Washington State to Florida in 2023, it instantly changed both states’ billionaire counts — Florida gained its richest resident, at roughly $370 billion according to Forbes’ 2026 figures, while Washington’s top spot passed to Steve Ballmer (roughly $164 billion) ahead of Bill Gates (roughly $118 billion). But it didn’t meaningfully shift either state’s median income or millionaire-household density, because those numbers reflect hundreds of thousands of households, not the tax address of one person.
A related misunderstanding is assuming the biggest individual fortunes and the densest clusters of ordinary millionaires live in the same places within a state. Warren Buffett has anchored Nebraska’s billionaire count from Omaha for decades, at roughly $151 billion as of Forbes’ most recent figures — but Nebraska doesn’t crack the top tier on either income or millionaire density; it’s a single extraordinary exception sitting inside an otherwise median state. The Walton family tells a similar story in reverse: Rob Walton (roughly $142 billion), Jim Walton (roughly $139 billion), and Alice Walton (roughly $129 billion) are three of the dozen richest people alive, all tied to Bentonville, Arkansas — a state that sits near the bottom of both the income and millionaire-density rankings. One family’s fortune, built from a single company, can coexist with a state economy that looks nothing like “rich” by any broader measure.
Bottom line
C) Wyoming. With roughly seven billionaires and fewer than 600,000 residents, Wyoming posts the highest billionaire-per-capita rate in the country — ahead of New York, Nevada, Montana, and California. The reason isn’t a hidden colony of tycoons in Jackson or Cheyenne; it’s that Wyoming combines zero state income tax with some of the country’s most favorable trust laws, making it an attractive place to domicile wealth structures even for people who spend little of the year there. Combine that appeal with a population small enough that a handful of ultra-wealthy filers can swing a per-capita rate, and you get a state that tops one “richest” ranking while barely registering on the other two. California and New York still win on raw billionaire headcount, New Jersey wins on the share of households that are comfortably millionaires, and Massachusetts wins on the income a typical household actually earns. All three are “the richest state.” They’re just not the same state.
Related reading:
– ZIP Codes: Where the Wealthy Live
– Billionaire Places: Teterboro, St. Barths, and Sun Valley
– Does Taxing Millionaires Make Them Leave? What the Evidence Actually Shows
– Billionaires Flood Miami: Wealth Migration and the New American Geography
– Average Net Worth by Age — and Where Millionaires Sit on the Curve
