Share of adults holding half
Click a country to see its anatomy.
For each country: the smallest share of adults who together hold half of everything. The lower the number, the more concentrated the country. A half line of 3% means the richest 3% hold as much as the other 97% combined.
Click a country to see its anatomy.
Every company is owned by someone. When a corporation owns land, buildings or machines, that value already shows up in household wealth as shares and pension funds, or in public wealth for state firms. Count corporate assets as their own pile and you count them twice. In WID's accounts, national wealth equals household wealth plus public wealth, and the corporate residual is zero.
So the panel splits corporations out in the two ways that hold up. Who holds the physical assets shows what corporations control directly. Shares and pensions shows how much of household wealth is really a claim on corporations. Those claims sit mostly with the top 10%.
The slider takes the country's 10 richest citizens (fewer where Forbes lists fewer), by today's Forbes real-time net worth, and subtracts their fortunes from the very top of the distribution and from the total. The rest of the distribution stays as WID measured it.
The result is usually smaller than people expect. In the US, ten people hold about 2% of household wealth, and the half line moves from 3.4% to 3.6%. The top 1% is 2.6 million adults, so concentration comes from that broad top, not from a handful of names.
Government assets (state firms, land, sovereign funds) minus government debt belong to no individual, so household-wealth statistics leave them out. The toggle hands each adult an equal slice. Norway's oil fund turns it from one of the more concentrated rich countries into the least concentrated by far. Where public wealth is negative (US, UK, Italy), the toggle hands each adult an equal slice of public debt. That makes those countries look more concentrated.
Distributions are WID 2024 estimates, built from tax records and surveys and calibrated to rich lists. Their quality varies by country (strong for France and the US, modelled for many others). Forbes fortunes are live as of October 2026, two years after the distribution, and count people by citizenship. In three cases (Norway, Netherlands, Chile), the ten fortunes exceed WID's own top 0.001% bracket, so the removal goes deeper than that bracket. Income figures can't be adjusted for billionaires because their annual income isn't published, so the scenarios apply to net worth only.
Sources: World Inequality Database (bulk data, updated Sept 2026): net personal wealth, pre-tax and post-tax national income shares, adults, equal-split (series shweal/sptinc/sdiinc j992), sector balance sheets (2024–25). Forbes Real-Time Billionaires, retrieved 12 Oct 2026. Half line, Lorenz curves and scenarios computed from 127 percentile groups per country, from the bottom 1% up to the top 0.001%.