Singapore’s average wealth is climbing, but there’s a catch

2025 was a banner year for personal wealth – but not for everybody. According to UBS’ 2026 Global Wealth Report, total wealth across the 56 markets it tracks grew 10.8 per cent in US dollar terms, more than twice as fast as in 2024 or 2023. The report itself flags the catch: As it puts it, there is “a fly in the ointment”.

The 10.8 per cent surge was driven disproportionately by gains among the richest. Average wealth rose sharply; median wealth – the figure for the person standing squarely in the middle of the distribution – actually fell in most markets, a divergence UBS says points to a growing gap between the wealthiest and everyone else. Nowhere was this starker than in the US, ranked second globally after Switzerland for average wealth per adult, but just 28th for median wealth — its average more than 10 times its median.

Singapore’s gap is the widest in Asia

Singapore’s numbers are less extreme than America’s, but the shape of the problem is the same. Singapore ranked sixth in the world for average wealth per adult in 2025 at US$527,217 (S$680,000), but only 20th for median wealth at US$96,434. The result: an average-to-median ratio of 5.47 times, the widest gap of any Asian economy in the UBS sample— well ahead of Hong Kong (3.45), South Korea (3.06), Taiwan (2.94) and Japan, where the two figures sit close together at just 1.56.

The comparison with Hong Kong is the most instructive. Hong Kong actually ranks above Singapore on average wealth (fourth, at US$648,267), but its median wealth is also higher – US$187,968, placing it in sixth place globally – and its average-to-median gap is far narrower. Hong Kong’s wealth appears to be more property-driven, with higher property values that are broadly held across the population. Singapore’s gap, by contrast, is stretched by a concentrated slice of financial wealth sitting at the very top.

Singapore added 244,000 US-dollar millionaires last year – 5,240 more than in 2024 – of which some 27,000 sat in the US$5 million to US$100 million bracket. Much of this reflects more than a decade of Singapore actively courting high-net-worth individuals, family offices and mobile capital: money that lifts the average sharply without doing much for the median at all.

What the official numbers show

The picture sharpens further with findings from the Ministry of Finance’s (MOF) February 2026 Occasional Paper – Singapore’s first-ever official breakdown of household wealth by quintile, based on 2023 data. It found that the bottom 20 per cent of households held average net wealth of S$293,000, versus S$5.26 million for the top 20 per cent – an 18-fold gap.

What’s striking is where that gap opens up. Home equity – property value minus outstanding mortgage – made up a similar share of wealth for both groups: 54 per cent for the bottom quintile, 58 per cent for the top. CPF savings, meanwhile, actually mattered more, proportionally, to poorer households: 39 per cent of wealth for the bottom quintile, versus just 15 per cent for the top. But discretionary financial assets – savings, dividends and investments – are where the real divergence lies: just 9.9 per cent of wealth for the bottom quintile, but 27 per cent for the top. In dollar terms, that’s roughly S$1.42 million in financial assets for the average top-quintile household – nearly five times the entire average wealth, including property, of a household in the bottom fifth.

Rich in financial assets, poor in growth

By UBS’ calculation, financial assets make up 63.8 per cent of Singapore’s gross household wealth – one of the highest shares in the region. SingStat’s own 2025 fourth-quarter household balance sheet puts the figure at a broadly similar 57.2 per cent. On the surface, this looks like a financially sophisticated population, heavily exposed to markets. Dig one layer deeper, and the picture flips. Equities and securities – the assets actually capable of compounding growth – make up just 11.2 per cent of total household assets, or just over one-fifth of that 57 to 64 per cent financial-assets bucket. The rest is overwhelmingly cash, mandatory CPF savings, and insurance: safe, low-yield instruments, not growth engines. Singapore, in other words, is financially deep but growth-asset shallow – and where genuine equity exposure does exist, MOF’s quintile data suggests it skews towards upper-income households, who hold far more in savings, dividends and investments than families further down the ladder.

The mechanism that follows from this is simple, and it’s the crux of the whole story: Assets that compound make their owners wealthier over time. Income, however comfortable, does not compound in the same way. A population sitting mostly on cash, CPF savings and property is a population that saves – but a population with meaningful equity exposure is one that grows its wealth.

Three ways to close the gap

If Singapore wants to narrow the gap between its average and its median wealth, the logical lever is to widen the broader population’s exposure to growth assets — not just at the top, but across every quintile below it. Here are three ideas, in ascending order of political difficulty:

First, make growth-asset investing the CPF default, not an opt-in choice. The CPF Investment Scheme (CPFIS) already exists, but it requires members to actively opt in and pick from an approved list – so, participation skews towards the financially engaged. Flip the default: Allocate a portion of the CPF Ordinary or Special Account automatically into a low-cost, diversified equity fund, with an easy opt-out for the risk-averse. This alone would extend growth-asset exposure to the entire wealth pyramid, not just the segment already comfortable choosing it.

Second, fix the regressive design of the Supplementary Retirement Scheme. SRS currently rewards contributors through tax relief – which is worth the most to high earners, not much to those who pay little income tax and nothing at all to those who pay none, which is the majority of the population.

A matching-contribution model, where the Government matches a share of SRS contributions from lower- and middle-income earners dollar for dollar, would redirect the incentive towards exactly the households currently least invested in growth assets.

SRS contributions can be invested in equities. But as at the end of 2024, around 19 per cent of SRS funds continued to be held in cash, earning low returns, because investments are, like in the CPFIS, an “opt-in” choice. So, here too, contributions could default into a low-cost diversified fund unless the account holder actively chooses to hold cash, rather than the reverse.

Third, a more radical and likely more contentious option: Consider a modest GIC/Temasek “equity bonus” which channels a small share of investment returns from Singapore’s sovereign wealth funds directly to individuals as an equity-linked bonus, rather than routing every dollar through the government budget. It would put a small stake in Singapore’s own growth-asset engine directly into ordinary citizens’ hands.

The case for sharing the gains

Paul Donovan, UBS Global Wealth Management’s chief economist, makes the underlying case well. “Wealth inequality is becoming more visible under the glare of the social media spotlight,” he notes. “This means that even when inequality has declined, awareness of inequality has increased.” But, he adds, “the more broadly wealth is shared, the less likely it is to be a government target or to create social tensions”.

Prime Minister Lawrence Wong has already made reducing wealth inequality part of his government’s agenda – and has so far delivered on it through progressive property taxes, stamp duties on property transactions and direct wealth transfers such as CPF top-ups. Widening access to growth assets would be a natural next chapter in that effort: not a handout, but a change to the plumbing – so that the wealth Singapore is creating starts compounding for everyone, not just those already at the top.