The Wealth Report 2025

The early months of 2025 have been marked by ongoing market uncertainty, driven by rapid AI-led technological advancements, geopolitical volatility, and heightened investor sensitivity to potential financial bubbles. However, despite these challenges, global GDP is projected to grow steadily, with forecasts suggesting a stronger performance than in the past two years.

In real estate, investment volumes—following a sharp decline from their 2021 peak—are beginning to stabilise. Data from the latter half of 2024 indicates a recovery trend, reinforcing the increasing role of private capital in the sector. Notably, 44% of family offices plan to increase their real estate investments, underlining continued confidence in the market’s long-term prospects.

Despite the risks, The Wealth Report 2025 identifies a wealth of investment opportunities across luxury residential markets, emerging commercial property sectors, and high-value collectible assets. For investors prepared to navigate uncertainty, the outlook remains strong, with diverse avenues for growth across multiple asset classes.

The Wealth Report is Knight Frank’s flagship thought-leadership publication. Now in its 19th edition, the report has become a highly anticipated document that is considered vital reading for UHNWIs across the globe and their advisors. Highlighting the issues that matter to UHNWIs, The Wealth Report is the ultimate guide to prime property markets, global wealth distribution, the threats and opportunities for wealth, commercial property investment opportunities, philanthropy and luxury spending trends.

How we chose the 2025 Report’s front cover

This year’s cover underscores the connections between global markets and the ability of investors to engage with opportunities anywhere in the world. By placing the globe inside a landscape, the illustration not only highlights our ability as advisors to bring the world to our clients but also emphasises the increasing importance of environmental considerations as the next generation begins to create and manage wealth portfolios. The illustration conveys the scale of both the uncertainty and the prospects that investors face. As we note in this edition, while volatility in economics and geopolitics appears to rise inexorably, the prospects for growth remain compelling for those brave enough to look beyond the risks.

Knight Frank Wealth Sizing Model

Taking established wealth estimation models (Davies et al. (2017) as our starting point, we have estimated levels of net wealth on a location-by-location basis using balance sheet data, where available, on households’ financial and non-financial wealth. Where data was not available, estimates were generated using econometric techniques. Utilising estimated Gini coefficients, we then drew the wealth distribution curve for each location, calibrating this with our own data as well as other industry standard sources.

This allows us to estimate the number of individuals in each location in the following wealth bands:

• HNWIs – those with net wealth of US$1 million or more
• UHNWIs – those with net wealth of US$30 million or more, and
• Billionaires – those with net wealth of US$1 billion or more.