Report

Estimating the top tail of the family wealth distribution in Canada – 2025 update

Sep 11, 2025

This report updates the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s High-net-worth Family Database (HFD) and highlights the recent evolution of the wealth distribution in Canada.

Supplementary Data (xlsx)
HFD 2023
Supplementary Data (xlsx)
HFD 2024

Highlights

The PBO 2023 High-net-worth Families Database (HFD) shows that the top one per cent of economic families in Canada hold 24 per cent of the country’s total net wealth, the top 10 per cent hold 53 per cent of total net wealth, and the top 20 per cent hold 69 per cent of total net wealth. The middle 40 per cent own around 27.6 per cent of net wealth and the bottom 40 per cent own around 3.3 per cent of net wealth.
The updated HFD estimates similar or slightly lower wealth concentration among high-net-worth families over time since 2019. There are significant sources of uncertainty in the data.
PBO finds that there were approximately 169,400 families in the top one per cent in 2023, and they each had a net wealth of at least $7.4 million. PBO projects these numbers to have grown to 176,800 families with a minimum net wealth of $7.5 million in the last quarter of 2024.
Ancillary analysis indicates that, while the full Survey of Financial Security (SFS) provides slightly more precision in its estimate of the wealth distribution compared to the Public Use Microdata SFS, the difference is small. Most of the improvement in capturing wealth at the top tail of the distribution comes from using the billionaire lists to supplement the SFS data.