New Zealand's richest individuals are worth at least $4.375 million. Photo: RNZ
New Zealand's 1 percenters are worth at least $4.375 million as an individual and $8.727m as a household - but how does that compare to the richest people in the rest of the world?
Stats NZ last week released data on New Zealanders' net worth, which showed an overall increase of 33 percent.
Median individual net worth is now $136,000 and the average is $489,000.
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Here's how that stacks up around the world.
In the United States, media reported this week that there were 1.3 million households in the top 1 percent, holding 30.8 percent of the country's wealth. The average net worth for each was US$38 million (NZ$65.59m).
In comparison, New Zealand's top 1 percent had 14.1 percent.
In the UK, it's been estimated that £3.6 million (NZ$8.35m) would get a household into the top 1 percent.
In Japan, it's about Y300 million (NZ$3.5m) and in India, media reported the top 1 percent had an average ₹54 million (NZ$1m) in wealth.
Investment bank UBS's latest Global Wealth report showed the United States and mainland China had 54 percent of the world's personal wealth between them. Japan's share was 4.5 percent, followed by the UK and Germany with 3.8 percent.
It said 680,000 people became US dollar millionaires for the first time in 2024, an increase of 1.2 percent.
"In percentage terms, the highest increase occurred in Türkiye, where it broke the 8 percent mark, with the United Arab Emirates in second place thanks to an expansion of 5.8 percent.
"We expect the number of USD millionaires to keep rising in most of the 56 markets that we track."
On a per capita basis, Switzerland and Luxembourg had the highest density of US dollar millionaires.
UBS said there were 2891 US dollar billionaires at the end of 2024.
Most were worth between US$1b and US$49b. Only 31 people in its sample had more than US$50b.
That report put New Zealand seventh on a wealth-=per capita basis with US$393,773 - which is roughly the same amount as in the Stats NZ data for the population aged 20-plus, with some movement of the exchange rate.
Kelly Eckhold, chief economist at Westpac, said that could reflect the housing assets that New Zealand had. He said the international comparison was difficult because the data collection could vary from country to country.
He said other countries tended to have more financial assets. "In the US there is a greater proportion of wealth in financial assets."
But he said the number of USD dollar millionaires in this country dropped in 2024 compared to the year before.
Knight Frank's latest wealth report said Australasia had 1918 people worth at least US$100m. In New Zealand, there were 5512 people worth at least US$10m, it said, or 0.2 percent of the global US$10m-plus population.
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