The median adult holds $9,000. The top 1% starts at $1 million. Type your number; find your tier.
My net worth is roughly $USD, debts and all.
Your global rank · among 3.81 billion adults
TOP 60%
Ahead of 1.53bn adults · band < $10k
The global wealth pyramid
Six tiers. 3.81 billion adults.
Each row is a band of net wealth. Adults on the left, wealth on the right; the two halves are the mirror of each other. Walk down the rows and you trade people for assets: 41% of adults hold 0.6% of the wealth at the base, and 2,891 billionaires at the apex hold more than the bottom half of humanity combined.
Slab widths use √(cumulative-adults) for legibility; the apex would otherwise be invisible. All printed numbers are unmodified.
Where the middle is
Median nine thousand. Mean a hundred twenty-three.
Mean wealth is roughly 13× higher than median wealth, the single cleanest measure of how top-heavy the distribution is. The median ($9,000) is the truer middle of humanity; the mean ($123,500) is what you get when you average billionaires and subsistence farmers in the same column.
Global median
$9k
50th percentile
Half of all adults hold less than this.
You
$9k
Top 60%
1.0 × the global median.
Global mean
$124k
~Top 18%
Average is pulled up 13× by the top of the pyramid.
Three numbers worth the asterisk
What the pyramid actually hides.
The inversion
40.7% of adults hold 0.6% of all wealth.
1.55 billion adults live below the $10,000 line. Their entire combined wealth is $2.71 trillion — less than the market cap of a single American tech company. Add the next band ($10k–$100k) and you cover 82% of the planet on 12.7% of the wealth.
The apex
0.21% of adults hold 22% of all wealth.
Eight million adults sit in the $5M-and-up band. They own as much wealth ($103.3T) as the entire $100k–$1M tier, which contains {{ratio}}× more people. Move up one more rung and 2,891 billionaires alone hold $15.7T — a 3.3% share that exceeds the bottom half of humanity by a factor of six.
The real middle
$100k–$1M is the global middle class.
628 million adults — 16.4% of the world — sit in this band, and they hold the largest single share of global wealth: 39.2%. If you own a paid-off home in most rich countries, you are likely already in this tier. The "global 1%" line sits at roughly $1M in net assets.
The lever you can pull
What the next rung costs.
Below the millionaire line the bands are wide on a log scale — a 10× jump each step. The dollar gap to the next rung is the most honest single number on this page: it is what the pyramid is really asking of you.
Next tier
$10k – $100k
Floor · $10k
You need
$1k
1.1× current
Top 60%→Top 59%
Tier above that
$100k – $1M
Floor · $100k
You need
$91k
11.1× current
Top 60%→Top 18%
The millionaire club
Sixty million millionaires. Where they live.
One in 64 adults has a million dollars. Most of them are in two places: North America, with 43% of the world's millionaires, and Western Europe with 26%. The map is reshaping fast — UBS projects another 5.3 million adults will cross the line by 2029, an accelerating 9% growth rate.
The number changes every month. Track it like one.
You are sitting in the < $10k tier — top 60% of adults worldwide. The pyramid moves underneath you every quarter. Plug your accounts into My Finance Tools — banks, brokerage, pension, property — and we re-run this percentile every month, against the same UBS pyramid. Move countries, get a raise, take on a mortgage; you see exactly where the line moves and why.
$1 million in net assets puts an adult in the global top 1.6%. $100,000 puts them in the top 18%. The median adult on earth holds about $9,000 in total wealth, mostly housing equity and modest savings.
They tell different stories. Income is a flow (what arrives this year); wealth is a stock (what you have accumulated, after debts). Globally, wealth is far more concentrated than income: the top 1.6% own 48% of all wealth, while the top 1% of earners take roughly 20% of income.
UBS pools national household balance-sheet data, household surveys, and rich-list adjustments (Forbes, Hurun) into a single per-adult distribution, then sorts adults into six bands by net wealth. The bottom band absorbs everyone with under $10,000 in assets, including those with negative net worth.
Yes, and the figure understates the inversion. Most of that 0.6% is concentrated in the upper half of the under-$10k band. The bottom decile is, on aggregate, negative — debts exceed assets. Conversely the top 0.21% own 22% of all wealth.
Because property dominates household balance sheets, and most of the world does not own property at scale. UBS does not publish $9,000 as a single headline number — it is derived from the band structure. Switzerland's within-country median is closer to $700,000; Indonesia's is around $5,000.
The United States holds about 23.8 million — roughly 40% of the world's millionaires — followed by mainland China (6.3M), the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan. 684,000 adults joined the millionaire band in 2024, and UBS projects another 5.3 million by 2029.