How many millionaires and billionaires are in the UK? I remember hearing a figure like 400,000 but it’s hard to pin down an accurate number. One approach is to look at how much they’re worth – that puts them into 5 groups:
There is a current of thought that the millionaires in the UK are actually growing in number, and while I can’t comment on whether or not this is true; we do know that there are 2.7 million millionaires in the United Kingdom and some interesting facts and figures about it. After all, why wouldn’t we want to know about how many millionaires there are in the UK?
More than five million people became millionaires during the global pandemic, research shows, as the gap between the rich and poor widens.
There are now around 56 million millionaires in the world.
Analysis by bank Credit Suisse shows that the UK now has the fifth-highest proportion of high net worth individuals in the world, with 4% of the total.
The number of UK millionaires rose from 2.2million in 2019 to 2.4million in 2020.
The percentage of the UK population worth more than £1million has risen steadily.
Back in 2000 just 1.7% of Brits qualified. That rose to 3% in 2010 and 4.7% in 2020.
The United States has the most millionaires – 39% of the total.
Behind that is China, with 9%, Japan, with 7%, Germany (5%) and the UK (4%).
How are people getting rich?
The number of millionaires is rising for several reasons, Credit Suisse said.
Firstly, rising house prices have helped many build large amounts of wealth.
Secondly, the recovery of stock markets around the world after the pandemic has meant investments rising in value.
Finally, many of the new millionaires have benefitted from currencies in their own countries performing very well against the US dollar.
Total global wealth grew by 7.4%. But the rising number of mega-rich does not mean we are all getting richer.https://get-latest.convrse.media/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mirror.co.uk%2Fmoney%2Fhow-five-million-people-became-24383336&cre=center&cip=18&view=web
In fact the opposite is true. The wealth gap between the poorest and richest grew in 2020, the report found.
Anthony Shorrocks, economist at Credit Suisse, said: “In the lower wealth bands where financial assets are less prevalent, wealth has tended to stand still, or, in many cases, regressed.”
For example, in the UK alone Covid more than doubled the number of families having welfare payments restricted as millions surged onto Universal Credit.
During the height of the pandemic richer households built up savings faster than normal, while poorer families ran them down or accumulated debts, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS).
The IFS said that, for richer households, falls in income have generally been outweighed by declines in spending, meaning they have been able to shore up surplus cash into savings more quickly than usual.
More than five million people became millionaires across the world in 2020 despite economic damage from the Covid-19 pandemic.
While many poor people became poorer, the number of millionaires increased by 5.2 million to 56.1 million globally, Credit Suisse research found.
In 2020, more than 1% of adults worldwide were millionaires for the first time.
Recovering stock markets and soaring house prices helped boost their wealth.
Wealth creation appeared to be “completely detached” from the economic woes of the pandemic, the researchers said.
Lower interest rates and government support programmes had led to “a huge transfer” of wealth from the public sector to the household sector, they added.
This had prompted a surge in household saving, which had “inflated household financial assets and caused household debts to be lower than they would be otherwise”.
The number of ultra-high net worth individuals, usually defined as those having investable assets of more than $30m, grew by 24% worldwide in 2020, the fastest rate of increase since 2003.
Credit Suisse said its total of the number of millionaires might be higher than other organisations’ estimates because it included both investable and non-investable assets, such as owner-occupied homes.
Anthony Shorrocks, economist and author of the Global Wealth Report, said the pandemic had an “acute short-term impact on global markets”, but added this was “largely reversed by the end of June 2020”.
“Global wealth not only held steady in the face of such turmoil, but in fact rapidly increased in the second half of the year,” he said.
However, wealth differences between adults widened in 2020, and Mr Shorrocks said if asset price increases, such as house price rises, were removed from the analysis, “then global household wealth may well have fallen”.
“In the lower wealth bands where financial assets are less prevalent, wealth has tended to stand still, or, in many cases, regressed,” he said.
“Some of the underlying factors may self correct over time. For example, interest rates will begin to rise again at some point, and this will dampen asset prices.”
Total global wealth grew by 7.4%, the report said.
Since the start of the 21st Century, the number of people with wealth between $10,000 and $100,000 had more than tripled in size from 507 million in 2000 to 1.7 billion in mid-2020.
They said the increase reflected the “growing prosperity of emerging economies, especially China, and the expansion of the middle class in the developing world”.
Nannette Hechler-Fayd’herbe, chief investment officer at Credit Suisse, said: “There is no denying actions taken by governments and central banks to organise massive income transfer programmes to support the individuals and businesses most adversely affected by the pandemic, and by lowering interest rates, have successfully averted a full scale global crisis.”
She added: “The lowering of interest rates by central banks has probably had the greatest impact.
“It is a major reason why share prices and house prices have flourished, and these translate directly into our valuations of household wealth.”
But she added that these interventions “have come at a great cost”.
“Public debt relative to GDP has risen throughout the world by 20 percentage points or more in many countries.
“Generous payments from the public sector to households have meant that disposable household income has been relatively stable and has even risen in some countries.”
Ms Hechler-Fayd’herbe said a “major reason” why share prices and house prices had “flourished” was due to the lowering of interest rates by banks, which, she added, translated “directly into our valuations of household wealth”.
According to a recent data, the number of millionaires in Britain is greater than ever and is still on the rise, despite Brexit.
Britain has the highest number of millionaires in Europe and the fourth highest number in the world, trailing only China, the US, and Japan.
Official figures from the Office for National Statistics show that by June 2016 3.6 million households had an attributed wealth exceeding £1m, a figure which has increased by a third in the past two years, and by over 40% in the last five years. The definition of wealth taken into account for this figure comprises of investments, pension savings, assets, and property value.
The figures suggest that currently one in every 65 adults in Britain could be considered a millionaire. Interestingly although not necessarily surprising, there is a direct correlation between being self-employed and achieving millionaire status as according to statistics, two-thirds of millionaires in the UK are in this category.
The main factors that have led to this rise in wealth have been the steady overall increase in property prices, a surge in pension values, and a boom in stock market gains over the past few years.
The number of homes worth £1 million across the country has grown drastically to around 770,000, and about 50% of these are located in the capital. These recent figures suggest that as a result, almost half a million Londoners are now “property millionaires”. The top postcodes were SW6 (with 14,020 million pound or more properties), NW3 (with 12,500), and N1 (with 11,301).
One in every four of these £1 million-plus homes are sold off-market. At Invisible Homes, we exclusively focus on off-market property and have currently launched in Fulham. Surprising coincidence considering that the majority of homes in Fulham are £1 million-plus? We think not.
The UK’s richest person is Sir Len Blavatnik – with his wealth increasing by £7.2bn this year to £23bn, according to The Sunday Times Rich List.
Sir Len, a dual UK-US citizen, was born in Ukraine and his company owns most of Warner Music as well as interests in real estate, chemicals and telecoms. He also has his own philanthropic foundation.
He moves up from fourth, replacing British inventor Sir James Dyson – who relinquished the top spot despite gaining £100m this year (£16.3bn).
Others to have made billions more against the backdrop of the pandemic include familiar Rich List names David and Simon Reuben, and Lakshmi Mittal and family.
The Reuben brothers came from humble beginnings in London to build a property empire that’s now worth more than £21bn (up £5.465bn), and stand second on the list.
Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal and family have also raked in another £7.9bn, leaping to fifth with an estimated £14.68bn fortune.
Conclusion
You may have heard the news that there are 12 million millionaires in Europe, but did you know that there are 1.8 million millionaires living within the United Kingdom? That’s right. According to Credit Suisse’s 2017 Global Wealth Databook, there are more millionaires in the UK than the rest of mainland Europe combined. They make up 0.8% of population here to be exact, which means you could walk past a millionaire every day and not even know it!