How many millionaires are there in Britain?
One think tank says 442,000.
The ONS data says 3.8 million.
Both are published as fact, and both are defensible.
The gap is not a disagreement about the country, it is a disagreement about what the word millionaire means.
Here is the real picture, and how to read any figure you see.
Key takeaways
- 3.8 million UK households, or 14%, hold total wealth of £1 million or more, on ONS figures.
- The Adam Smith Institute counts just 442,000, because it counts individual adults in inflation-adjusted pounds rather than households in cash terms.
- UBS puts the UK at over 2 million, but it counts dollar millionaires, and $1 million is roughly £790,000.
- The typical millionaire household is at £1.44 million, and most of it is the house and the pension rather than cash.
- 12% of households have less than £20,000 to their name.
Contents
How many millionaires are there in the UK?
On the best official data available, about 3.8 million households in Great Britain hold total wealth of £1 million or more.
That is 14% of all households, or roughly one in seven, from the ONS Wealth and Assets Survey covering April 2020 to March 2022.
Total wealth means everything the household owns: property equity, private pensions, savings and investments, and physical items like cars, minus every debt.
That last part is why the number feels too high. Most people picture a millionaire as someone with a million in the bank. Almost nobody in that 3.8 million does.
Why the answer ranges from 442,000 to 3.8 million
Search this question and you will be handed wildly different numbers, all stated confidently. They are measuring different things. Here is what each one actually counts.
| Source | Figure | What it counts |
|---|---|---|
| ONS (Wealth and Assets Survey) | 3.8 million | Households with £1m+ total wealth, in cash terms |
| UBS Global Wealth Report | Over 2 million | Individual adults with $1m+, roughly £790,000 |
| Adam Smith Institute | 442,000 | Individual adults with £1m+, in inflation-adjusted pounds |
Three differences explain nearly the whole gap.
Households or people. This is the big one. A couple worth £600,000 each are a millionaire household but neither is a millionaire. Counting people instead of households cuts the number sharply.
Pounds or dollars. A dollar millionaire needs about £790,000. A pound millionaire needs £1 million. Dollar counts therefore come out higher, which is why UBS and most international comparisons sit above sterling measures.
Cash terms or real terms. The ONS figure is in the money of the day. The Adam Smith Institute adjusts for inflation, so a household that only kept pace with rising prices stops counting as newly wealthy. Over a decade of high inflation that makes an enormous difference.
One thing worth saying plainly: the Adam Smith Institute’s tracker is a model, not a headcount. It fits a statistical curve to national accounts data, and the institute itself notes the method tracks year-to-year changes more reliably than the absolute level, which it describes as uncertain. That is a fair caveat and worth carrying whenever you see the 442,000 quoted as a hard fact.
You will also see figures quoted to the nearest single person. Treat those with suspicion. Every number on this page is an estimate from a survey or a model, and none of them is accurate to the last millionaire.
The full UK wealth ladder
Millionaire households are the top of a distribution, so here is the whole thing.
| Total household wealth | Share of households | Households |
|---|---|---|
| £1 million or more | 14% | 3,816,000 |
| £500,000 to £1 million | 20% | 5,416,000 |
| £300,000 to £500,000 | 15% | 4,084,000 |
| £200,000 to £300,000 | 10% | 2,655,000 |
| £85,000 to £200,000 | 14% | 3,650,000 |
| £20,000 to £85,000 | 16% | 4,237,000 |
| Less than £20,000 | 12% | 3,132,000 |
Source: ONS, Total wealth data tables, Table 2.5, April 2020 to March 2022
A third of British households are worth half a million or more. At the other end, more than three million households have under £20,000 to their name. Both facts are true at once, and that is the honest shape of wealth in this country.
What a typical millionaire household actually looks like
Not what you are picturing. Within the £1 million and over group, the median household sits at £1,437,600. A quarter are below £1,161,200 and a quarter are above £1,938,500.
So the typical millionaire household is not scraping over the line, but it is not a yacht owner either. It is sitting at about £1.4 million, and the composition explains everything. Across the wealthiest 10% of households, median holdings are roughly £624,000 of property, £626,000 of private pension, £218,000 of savings and investments and £123,000 of physical items.
Property and pension together are around 80% of it. That is a paid-off house and a working life of pension contributions, not a windfall. It also means most of that wealth cannot be spent without selling the home or reaching pension age, which is why so many millionaire households do not feel like millionaires.
We dug into that gap between paper wealth and reachable money in our guide to the average net worth by age.
Is the number of UK millionaires falling?
You will have seen headlines saying it is collapsing. Be careful here, because two very different claims get mixed together.
The inflation-adjusted count is falling. The Adam Smith Institute has the sterling figure at 442,000, down 7% in a year and the lowest since 2008. It attributes this to falling real asset prices, a low savings rate and wealthy people leaving the country.
The ONS household figure looks like it fell too, and that part is misleading. The previous survey round put 17% of households above £1 million against 14% now. That looks like a sharp drop, but the ONS changed how it values defined benefit pensions between the two rounds and states plainly that the figures are not comparable. Some of that apparent fall is a change in the maths, not a change in Britain.
The honest summary: in real terms British wealth has taken a knock, and the number of people clearing a million in today’s money has come down. But anyone showing you a clean 17% to 14% decline is comparing two things the ONS says cannot be compared.
How much wealth is there in total?
Great Britain holds an estimated £13.6 trillion in privately owned wealth. It is not spread evenly.
| Group | Share of all household wealth |
|---|---|
| Wealthiest 1% | 10% |
| Wealthiest 10% | 41% |
| Wealthiest 50% | 91% |
| Least wealthy 50% | 9% |
Source: ONS, Privately owned wealth in the UK, FOI-2025-2713, April 2025
The wealthiest 1% of households hold as much as the entire bottom half put together. If you want the entry price for that group, we cover the top 1% net worth in the UK separately. It is a good deal higher than a million.
How to actually become one
The data points at something quite undramatic. Millionaire households are mostly made by two things running for a long time: a mortgage being paid down, and pension contributions compounding.
The pension is doing more work than people realise. Private pensions are close to level with property in the wealthiest 10%, and pension contributions come with employer matching and tax relief that nothing else matches. Our guide to the average pension pot shows how far most people are from that.
The ISA route is slower but reachable. £20,000 a year of tax-free allowance compounds into serious money over decades, and we have run the numbers on becoming an ISA millionaire.
Time matters more than income. As we found looking at the top 1%, the highest earning tenth of households still has median wealth well under a million. Earning a lot and building wealth are not the same activity.
If you want the full route, our guide on how to become a millionaire runs the maths properly, and the average savings by age is a more realistic checkpoint for most people. The rest of our investing guides pick up from there.
How reliable are these numbers?
They are not 2026 figures. The ONS household data was collected between April 2020 and March 2022 and published in January 2025.
The ONS suspended the survey’s accreditation in June 2025, citing concerns about quality at a granular level and falling response rates.
The wealthiest are hardest to count. The ONS warns that estimates are volatile at the extreme ends of the distribution and that the very wealthiest tend to be under-represented in surveys. The true number of millionaire households could be higher.
It was collected by phone during lockdown, which under-counted renters and over-represented outright owners.
It remains the best national wealth data Britain has. It is just a snapshot from a strange period, and every figure here is an estimate rather than a headcount.
