Rich List 2026: 157 billionaires hold 22% of the UK’s GDP in wealth

A total of 157 billionaires now hold 22% of the entire nation’s GDP in wealth, the Equality Trust discovered after analysing the Sunday Times Rich List.

The daily newspaper first published its figures on the super rich 37 years ago, in 1989. Then, 15 billionaires owned £27 billion or 4p in every pound, accounting for inflation. Now, 157 billionaires own about £670 billion or 22p in every pound.

The Equality Trust further found that 30% of billionaire wealth comes from finance, as opposed to the real economy. Finance is a bubble of essentially exploiting an unregulated capitalist market as much as possible, it doesn’t contribute to the material conditions that impact people’s lives.

Rich List ranks people and families by net wealth

In the Guardian, Priya Sahni-Nicholas, co-executive director of the charity, described financialisation as “rentier capitalism: sitting on appreciating assets, collecting rents, charging fees for moving money around”, adding that it “extracts value from the economy rather than creating it”.

Simon Pittaway, a senior economist at the Resolution Foundation, added:

The growing value of wealth has meant that, even though traditional measures of wealth inequality haven’t risen, the absolute gaps between typical households and those at the top have grown significantly.

Today, if someone with typical levels of wealth miraculously saved all of their earnings throughout their entire working life, it would no longer be enough to move them up to the top of Britain’s wealth ladder.

Indeed, if someone earns a high post-tax £100,000 per year salary, it would take them 10,000 years to become a billionaire. This underscores the fact that becoming super rich involves extracting money from other people’s work.

Who’s on the 2026 list?

The UK’s richest household in the Sunday Times ranking is the Hinduja family, a dynasty owning the Indian-British conglomerate, Hinduja Group. Their £38 billion business involves finance, oil, private healthcare and real estate. These are all destructive industries, whether its the climate or treating necessities like energy, healthcare and housing as for-profit industries.

Jim Ratcliffe is ninth out of 350 people on the list. In December 2025, Labour turned Ratcliffe, who’s worth £15 billion, into one of Britain’s biggest benefit claimants. The government did that through an £120 million public subsidy to Ratcliffe’s chemicals company Ineos, despite it holding £1.75 billion in cash at the time.

Featured image via the Canary

By James Wright

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