THE UNITED STATES added nearly half of all new millionaires created worldwide in 2025. According to UBS's annual Global Wealth Report, America's 441,078 new millionaires account for nearly half of all new global millionaires. More than 1,200 crossed the threshold every day, and more than 10 times the number added by the UK, the next-closest rival. By the end of the year, 23.6m of the world's 57.5m millionaires-roughly 41%-lived on American soil.
The headline number sounds like a triumph. It is not. The same report shows that median wealth per adult in the United States has fallen by nearly 20% since 2020, to just $68,998. Average wealth, pulled skyward by the rich, sits at $696,277-a gap so large it can be understood only by looking at what has driven the gains.
The reason is not hard to see. Approximately 79% of American household wealth sits in financial assets, far more than in most developed economies. Global wealth grew by 10.8% in 2025, the fastest pace since 2017, but the mechanism of that growth matters as much as the headline figure. When a stock market rallies, those who already own the market reap the rewards. Those who do not-because their savings sit in cash, a modest retirement account, or a mortgaged house-watch the median fall further behind. UBS's data for 2025 confirms what the mechanism predicts: every one of the 56 markets it tracked ended the year with more millionaires than it started with, while median wealth fell in most of them.
To be sure, the creation of new millionaires is not inherently bad. Wealth accumulation signals entrepreneurship, productivity, and economic dynamism. And the proportion of adults in the lowest wealth band-below $10,000-has dropped from almost 75% in 2000 to just over 41% in 2025, according to UBSUBS--. That is a real, if uneven, improvement in global living standards.
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The trouble is that the gains are not being shared proportionately. The divergence between average and median wealth in America is a diagnostic of how the economy distributes its rewards. A ratio of roughly 10 to 1 between average and median wealth per adult suggests a distribution so skewed that the "average" American household is a statistical fiction. The typical American has one-tenth of what the average implies. That is not a failure of measurement; it is a feature of an economy where financial markets are the primary vehicle for wealth creation and where access to those markets is heavily concentrated.
The incentive structure behind this is straightforward. Financial assets appreciate through two channels: earnings growth and valuation expansion. Earnings growth, in theory, reflects productivity and should benefit a broader pool of investors. Valuation expansion-where the same stream of future earnings is simply priced higher-rewards those already on the right side of the wealth threshold. With 79% of American household wealth in financial assets, a bull market functions less as a shared prosperity engine and more as a regressive transfer from savers who cannot access those assets to those who already hold them in scale.
It is tempting to blame the stock market for this outcome. The deeper problem is institutional. The American tax system penalises labour income and subsidises capital gains. The top federal income tax rate on earned income is 37%, while the top long-term capital-gains rate is 20%, plus a 3.8% net investment income surcharge-still substantially below the rate on wages. The estate tax, the one mechanism designed to interrupt intergenerational concentration, applies only above a very high per-individual threshold. In practice, that means the typical millionaire pays less in marginal tax on the accumulation of wealth than the typical earner pays on a salary. The system rewards those who already have.
This is not merely an American problem. UBS's report shows similar dynamics globally: wealth above $5m... is the fastest-growing segment. But the American case is disquieting because of scale. No other country combines financial-asset dominance of this kind with tax treatment so explicitly tilted toward capital. Europe, for instance, still has a larger share of household wealth in housing, which distributes gains more broadly across the middle class. China's wealth is concentrated, but its financial markets have not served as the primary wealth-creation channel for its population in the way America's have.
What should follow? The politics of wealth concentration tend to generate bad policy. When the typical American feels left behind while millionaire counts rise, the response is often protectionism, populist taxes on conspicuous consumption, or hostility to capital formation. Those instincts are understandable but economically incoherent. Tariffs do not redistribute; they raise prices. Sin taxes do not alter structural incentives. The better answers are plainer and harder to sell.
The first task is to narrow the gap between the tax treatment of labour and capital. Capital-gains rates that are more than 10 percentage points below the top marginal rate on earned income send a signal that wealth is worth less to the public purse than work. Raising capital-gains rates, or closing the loophole that allows carried interest to be taxed as capital gains rather than ordinary income, would not destroy prosperity. It would alter its distribution.
The second is to make the tax system less dependent on the realised. A wealthy American can defer tax on appreciated assets indefinitely-through buy, borrow, die cycles that effectively exempt the richest from income taxation altogether. Reform along those lines would be politically difficult. But it is the kind of difficulty that American institutions are supposed to be capable of resolving.
The third, and most politically dangerous, is to acknowledge that financial-market performance is not the same thing as economic health. Policymakers who equate a strong stock market with broad prosperity are committing a category error. A rising market can coexist with a falling median. Recognising that distinction would change what governments consider a successful economic outcome.
The UBS report is produced by a wealth manager, an institution whose business model depends on the continued growth of the assets under management it serves. Its data should be read with that incentive in mind. But the numbers it publishes-the millionaire count, the median decline, the average-versus-median gap-are consistent with what other data sources show. The divergence is real. The question is whether anyone in Washington has the institutional seriousness to address it.
