Personal wealth around the world expanded at its quickest rate in close to a decade during 2025, according to UBS's Global Wealth Report released in August 2026. The bank counted almost one million people crossing into millionaire status over the course of the year, bringing the global total to about 57.5 million, an average of roughly 2,600 new millionaires minted every single day.
Overall personal wealth climbed 10.8 percent across 2025, a sharp acceleration from the 4.6 percent growth recorded in 2024 and the 4.2 percent seen in 2023. UBS points to a combination of strong equity markets, rising property values and favorable currency swings, with the euro gaining roughly 9 percent against the dollar over the period, as the main forces behind the jump.
The United States remains the biggest concentration of individual wealth by a wide margin, home to about 23.6 million millionaires, roughly 40 percent of the global count, after adding more than 440,000 new ones in a single year. Western Europe follows with close to 15 million millionaires, while China holds more than 5.3 million and Japan around 3 million. Eastern Europe posted the fastest regional growth rate of all, with personal wealth there rising 28 percent, driven largely by real estate gains and currency effects.
Technology remains one of the clearest paths to sudden fortune in this cycle. UBS highlights a handful of individuals whose wealth surged on the back of artificial intelligence and semiconductor gains, including Surya Midha of the AI recruiting platform Mercor, whose stake is now valued at roughly 2.2 billion dollars at just 23 years old, and Mati Staniszewski, co-founder of the voice AI company ElevenLabs, whose holding is worth about 1.8 billion dollars. In wealth management, Creative Planning founder Peter Mallouk was cited as one of the sector's standout gainers, with a fortune UBS puts at around 16.1 billion dollars.
The report frames 2025 as a turning point after several years of steadier, single-digit wealth growth, with asset revaluation rather than new income doing much of the work. Real estate appreciation played an outsized role in Europe specifically, while in the United States and parts of Asia the run-up in technology valuations did more of the heavy lifting. UBS expects the pace of new millionaire creation to remain elevated in the near term, though it cautions that much of the recent gain rests on asset prices that can move in the other direction just as quickly.