Total UK wealth by asset class and economic activity

FOI reference: FOI-2025-3073

You asked

Please could you send me a breakdown from the latest Wealth & Assets survey of total UK wealth by asset class (property wealth, private pension wealth etc) based on people’s economic activity (e.g. employee vs self-employed etc)?

Essentially I would like to see a breakdown of how much wealth people have in different asset classes based on whether they are employed or self-employed.

Please can I also have a breakdown by age? I would like to see how much wealth the self-employed have by asset class (property, pension etc) and how that varies by age - and then compare that to employees.

We said

Thank you for your request. 

We collect information used to estimate net household total wealth using the Wealth and Assets Survey (WAS) covering Great Britain, with our latest data covering the period April 2020 to March 2022. 

Unfortunately, we do not hold a specific table with the data in your request. However, our most recent Household total wealth in Great Britain: April 2020 to March 2022 publication, which was released in January 2025, contains data which may help meet your request. The associated spreadsheet shows where individual wealth for each asset class (which we refer to as ‘wealth component’) is shown by economic activity and where it is shown by age.

You may also be interested in previous analysis of net total household wealth and its components by age and by economic status. Our publication Household total wealth in Great Britain: April 2018 to March 2020 includes analysis showing median wealth by age (Figure 4: ‘Median total household wealth and components by age of household reference person, Great Britain, April 2018 to March 2020’) and median and mean wealth by economic status of the HRP  (Table1: ‘Median, mean and mean-to-median ratio of total household wealth and components by economic status of household reference person, Great Britain, April 2018 to March 2020’).  

If this data does not meet your requirements, we could create the requested information for you via a custom output via our bespoke services route. This route is subject to disclosure controls, legal frameworks, resources, and an agreement of costs in line with our charging policy.

For any queries regarding bespoke wealth analysis and an estimate of the cost to produce, please contact wealth.and.assets.survey@ons.gov.uk. Here you can also discuss the data, its strengths and limitations and the ways it can be analysed. 

We also provide WAS data under End User Licence (EUL) via the UK Data Service (UKDS) which can be accessed here: EUL WAS Data. Again, please email wealth.and.assets.survey@ons.gov.uk if you’d like further information on using the dataset and restrictions around commercial use.