Privately owned wealth in the UK

Dyddiad y datganiad:
16 April 2025

FOI reference: FOI-2025-2713

You asked

Please can you answer the following questions:

  1. What is the total value of privately owned wealth in the UK? I believe this is £13.6T but can you confirm if this is true and, if not, provide me with the actual value?

  2. What % of the total private wealth of the UK is owned by the richest 50%, 10%, 1%, and 0.1% of the households?

  3. What is the minimum wealth of households in the richest 50%, 10%, 1%, and 0.1% category? I think one of your webpages mentions that the richest 1% of households had wealth of more than £3.6 million, but not sure about the other, especially the 0.1% category?

  4. What % of households have wealth above £5M and £10M, and what is the total value of the wealth held by households in these categories?

  5. What % of homes in the UK are owned by individuals as their sole residence? i.e., the house owned by the individual is the only house they own and is not their second, third, fourth, etc, home.

  6. What % of people own 2 homes, and 3+ homes?

We said

Thank you for your enquiry concerning the total wealth statistics and estimates for the top 50%, 10%, 1% and 0.1%. 

We collect information used to estimate household total wealth using the Wealth and Assets Survey (WAS) covering Great Britain in the period April 2020 to March 2022.

  1. Our estimates of total household wealth in Great Britain are found in Table 2.1 of our Total Household Wealth data tables. You’ll see from these data tables we estimate the total value of privately owned wealth in Great Britain to be £13.6 trillion. Please note that these are estimates based on survey data rather than the true value and therefore will come with a degree of sampling and non-sampling error. For more information please see our WAS Quality and Methodology Information.

  2. As reported in our Household total wealth in Great Britain: April 2020 to March 2022 publication, we estimate that the wealthiest 1% of households hold 10% of all household wealth in Great Britain. Meanwhile, the wealthiest 10% of households hold 41% of wealth and the wealthiest 50% of household hold 91% of total wealth. 

  3. An estimate for minimum wealth value of the richest 50% will be given by the median total household wealth figure. This is reported within Household total wealth in Great Britain: April 2020 to March 2022 as £293,700, the wealthiest 10th percentile has a household wealth of £1,200,500 and the wealthiest 1% had wealth of at least £3,121,500. 

  4. Analysis found in our property wealth tables show that 4% of households own a second home.  

Unfortunately, the remaining requested information would need to be created as a bespoke analysis requiring specialist statistical skill, so is not held for the purposes of FOI. However, you may be able obtain via our bespoke services route, which 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.  

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