Report published September 23, 2026

Global Macro Chart of the Day: The Incredible Accumulation of Wealth at the Top

UBS · September 23, 2026

UBS analysis shows that US wealth and equity holdings remain hyper-concentrated, with the top 20% owning 73% of net worth and 87% of non-pension equities. Consequently, recent aggregate consumption strength is driven primarily by asset-wealth effects at the top rather than broad-based income growth.

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Finvaulta summarizes UBS's analysis. Attribute opinions, forecasts, time-sensitive values, and chronology to the issuer and report date; do not treat this page as an independent verification or a current market-data source.

Key Takeaways

1.US wealth is even more skewed than income: the top 20% owns 73% of net worth and 70% of all household assets, whereas the bottom 60% holds just 15% of assets.
2.Equity ownership outside pension funds is heavily concentrated at the very top, with 87% held by the top 20% (and 40 percentage points held by the top 1%), compared to only 5% held by the bottom 60%.
3.US consumption resilience is primarily fueled by wealth effects rather than broad income gains, with new equity wealth generating an estimated 0.8–0.9% of GDP in annual consumption.

Still looks K-shaped to me

Report data

Figure 1: The top 20% of the income distribution holds 73% of US wealth and 88% of US equities (outside of pension funds)

Metric	Estimate	Context
Top 20% income share	52%	Share of all income received by the top 20% of US households
Total US household assets	205 USD Trillion	Aggregate assets held by US households against about $20 trillion in liabilities
Top 20% share of net worth	73%	Share of US wealth (net worth) owned by the top 20% of the income distribution
Top 20% share of non-pension equities	87%	Share of equities held outside pension funds owned by the top 20%
Quarterly household asset growth	3.7 USD Trillion	Average quarterly increase in US household assets, totaling ~$49 trillion