Private banks and luxury developers use ultra-high-net-worth for the wealth tier above a High-Net-Worth Individual (HNWI). The figure most often cited is about $30 million in investable assets. Crossing it changes the service model: a specialist team replaces a single advisor, private-market funds become realistic, and an off-plan home is treated as a portfolio allocation rather than a mortgage purchase.
The Thirty Million Threshold
Capgemini’s World Wealth Report draws the line at $30 million or more in investable assets. That measure leaves out the primary residence, collectibles, consumables, and consumer durables. The same report sorts everyone with $1 million or more into three bands: millionaires next door from $1 million to $5 million, mid-tier millionaires from $5 million to $30 million, and this top band at $30 million or more.
At the end of 2025 the report counted about 250,000 people in the top band, roughly 1 percent of a 25.3 million millionaire population, holding 34.8 percent of $98.3 trillion in high-net-worth wealth. That band’s population rose 9.4 percent in 2025 and its wealth rose 9.7 percent, faster than the millionaire population as a whole. The gains were tied to heavier exposure to public markets and to private assets that smaller portfolios rarely reach.
Investable Assets Versus Net Worth
Knight Frank uses a different test in The Wealth Report. Its wealth-sizing model counts people worth more than $30 million in net worth, so homes and other property can be included. On that basis the global population rose from 551,435 in 2021 to 713,626 in 2026. The gap with Capgemini’s investable-asset count is the point of the label: two households can each show $30 million on paper and still fall on opposite sides of the line if one fortune is a house or a private company and the other is a portfolio a manager can actually allocate.
| Source | What Is Counted | Entry Line |
| Capgemini World Wealth Report | Investable assets, excluding the primary home, collectibles, and consumer durables | $30 million or more |
| Knight Frank Wealth Report | Net worth, which can include homes and other property | More than $30 million |
Off-Plan Buyers and Private Banks
Luxury developers use the tier for buyers who can contract for a residence before the building exists. The deposit and the later staged payments have to come from capital that is not tied up in the home they live in, which is why an investable-asset test matters more at reservation than a headline net worth does. In October 2026, Knight Frank described one Miami project with $1.7 billion of apartment sales agreed before groundbreaking, including two penthouses at about $50 million each. About 65 percent of those buyers were domestic, many of them from finance and technology. The same account said the United States produced 41 percent of the people who newly passed $30 million of net worth in the five years to 2026 and is home to 35 percent of that global population.
Developers usually keep that buyer in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) record from the first private viewing through reservation. One off-plan contract can mean years of staged payments, a cross-border tax question, and a second-home search in another city. Private banks staff the same client with a team for tax, estate transfer, philanthropy, and alternatives such as private equity, rather than a single advisor and a standard product shelf.
