On Tuesday, UBS published the 17th edition of its Global Wealth Report. Total personal wealth rose by 10.8 percent in US dollar terms last year, the strongest reading since 2017 and a third consecutive year of growth.

Switzerland leads the world in average wealth per adult resident, at 910,382 dollars (roughly 736,000 francs at current exchange rates), ahead of the United States and Luxembourg.

The median tells another tale

Measured by median wealth per adult resident, the figure that splits a population into a richer and a poorer half, Switzerland slips to eighth place, at 145,555 dollars (behind Luxembourg at 394,005, Belgium, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, Hong Kong, and Canada).

The contrast between average and median shows how a comparatively small group of very wealthy residents lifts the national average. The average Swiss adult is thus worth more than six times the typical one.

A question of inequality

UBS makes this divergence a theme of the report. Across the 56 markets it tracks, average wealth climbed sharply in 2025 while median outcomes lagged in most of them. The gains were anything but evenly shared.

On the Gini coefficient, UBS's measure of wealth equality, Switzerland scores 0.68 and ranks a mid-table 20th of 56 markets, marginally more unequal than Germany (0.67) but well below the United States at 0.77.

Debt weighs on the median

The spread between average and median is far wider in the United States, at roughly ten to one, while in Luxembourg it is only a factor of 1.7 to 1.

In Switzerland, high household debt, equal to 20.5 percent of gross wealth and among the highest in the sample, also weighs on the net median.

A weak dollar as the driver

Much of the striking increase in wealth was a currency effect rather than a wealth effect. In Europe, the Middle East and Africa, wealth jumped 17.5 percent, helped by a roughly 9 percent rise of the euro against the dollar. The Americas grew 8.5 percent and Asia-Pacific 5.9 percent.

Accordingly, UBS chief economist Paul Donovan warns against reading too much into the absolute figures. «People tend to think about their wealth relative to the wealth of others, rather than in absolute terms,» he notes in the report, pointing to a perception of inequality that can grow even as inequality itself recedes.

Nearly a million new millionaires

The number of millionaires grew again, by about 1.5 percent. That is equivalent to almost one million new dollar millionaires in a single year, or more than 2,600 a day.

In 2025, for the first time, not one market recorded a decline in dollar millionaires.

Nearly half of the new millionaires were in the United States, which added more than 440,000. Switzerland is home to roughly 944,000 dollar millionaires and remains close to the top on density. Only Luxembourg counts a higher share of millionaires in its adult population.

Two markets hold half the world

Concentration remains the defining feature of global wealth. The United States and mainland China together still account for more than half of the world's personal wealth. The United States alone hosts over 40 percent of all dollar millionaires.

This year, UBS also trained its lens on the segments above 5 million dollars. These «beyond-5-million» groups now comprise around seven million adults worldwide, more than four million of them in the United States. Their number has grown at a rate of over 7 percent a year since 2000. In Switzerland, about 114,000 people belong to this group.

Rising demand for advice

For UBS, the object under study, global wealth itself, is highly relevant to its own business. With 4.8 trillion dollars in managed assets at the end of 2025 and 6.9 trillion dollars of invested assets as of the first quarter of 2026, its wealth management arm holds one of the top positions internationally.

The two Co-Presidents of UBS Global Wealth Management, Iqbal Khan and Robert Karofsky, also read the findings as evidence of rising demand for advice in a more volatile world.

Beyond the balance sheet

Beyond the bare numbers, the report also offers a few intriguing asides. Wealthy collectors, for instance, hold around 20 percent of their wealth in art, a share that rises with wealth.

And the 2025 Nobel laureate in economics, Joel Mokyr, argues in an interview that it is ultimately human capital, not financial capital, that secures prosperity.