Where are the world’s millionaires and how is wealth divided globally?

Almost half of the world’s wealth, 47.5 percent or $213 trillion, is held by just 1.5 percent of the global adult population.

The world has at least 58 million US dollar millionaires, accounting for 1.5 percent of the global adult population, according to the 2024 UBS Global Wealth Report (PDF), which sampled 56 markets that account for 92 percent of global wealth.

The United States has the highest number of millionaires, with some 21.95 million individuals having wealth in seven figures or more. China comes at a distant second with some 6.01 million millionaires, followed by the United Kingdom (3.06 million), France (2.87 million) and Japan (2.83 million).

UBS defines wealth as the value of financial assets and real assets minus debts held by a household.

Global wealth, in dollar terms, grew by 4.2 percent in 2023 after a decline of 3 percent in 2022, according to UBS.

“If you think of millionaires or the wealthy in general, there’s kind of an indigenous, core of millionaires that has a strong attachment to the country. Then there is a more mobile element that globally [is able to] fairly easily switch domiciles,” Samuel Adams, an economist at UBS, told Al Jazeera.

By 2028, the UK is expected to lose the most millionaires – nearly one in six of its millionaires will lose that status. The Netherlands is another country set to lose 4 percent of its millionaires by 2028.

“The point here with the Netherlands and the UK that we’re making is that both of these countries already have a lot of millionaires – they have a growing core. But then you have a very mobile [element] working around that. And it might be that, in the global competition for wealth, they could see some outflows of the more mobile element of the wealthy.