The number of millionaires has skyrocketed over the past two decades, driven by globalisation, the boom in the technology industry, the expansion of financial markets, real estate price rises, and the growth in emerging market economies.
However, no country is close to the United States when it comes to the total number of people with one million dollars or more in their wealth buckets.
According to data presented by Stocklytics.com, the United States counts almost 22 million millionaires, or 50% more than China, France, Japan, and Germany combined.
The number of U.S. dollar millionaires has risen sharply over the past twenty years. According to UBS 2024 Global Wealth Report, the count stood at 14.7 million in 2000. Since then, this figure has skyrocketed by 300 per cent and hit 58 million in 2023.
Shockingly, almost 40 per cent were from the United States, home to the largest millionaire club. Over the years, the country has grown into the dominant market and source of growth for the high-net-worth economy. Last year, the United States hosted nearly 22 million millionaires, representing 6.6 per cent of the country’s population.
This figure represents a massive 187 per cent increase compared to the number of millionaires in 2000 and is twice the population of countries like Portugal, Sweden, or Greece. The U.S. millionaire club’s dominance becomes even more apparent when compared to other top economies.
Although the second-ranked China saw millionaire numbers rise especially fast in the past two decades, the country still counted six million millionaires in 2023, or 3.6 times less than the United States, representing roughly 10 per cent of the world’s millionaires club. However, this was still twice the number reported in the third market, the United Kingdom. Interestingly, no other country counted more than three million millionaires.
Although Western Europe contributed 28 per cent of the world’s millionaire population, European countries reported much lower figures. For instance, Germany and France had a millionaire population of roughly 2.8 million, similar to Japan, while Canada counted less than two million people with a wealth of one million dollars or more.
The UBS survey also showed that 52 of the 56 analyzed nations will see an increase in millionaires in the next five years. In the United States, in particular, over 3.5 million Americans will join the millionaire club by 2028, pushing their total number to over 25 million. This is practically twice the number of new millionaires in the other top markets combined.
China is expected to have 500,000 new millionaires in the next five years, Japan 800,000, and France, Germany and Canada roughly 400,000. On the other hand, the United Kingdom is one of the notable exceptions, with a projected 17 per cent decline, or around 500,000 fewer millionaires in 2028 than in 2023.
