Distribution of household wealth in line with national accounts

Wealth distribution, and in particular the gap between the richest and the poorest, remains a highly relevant topic in the public discourse and an increasingly important concern for policymakers. While distributional results are available from micro-statistics, there is an increasing demand for distributional results that are aligned to macro-economic statistics. To address this demand, the OECD launched the Expert Group on Distributional Household Wealth (EG DHW) in 2023 to help provide internationally comparable distributional information aligned to national accounts. The EG DHW is part of the G20 Data Gaps Initiative, mandated to produce annual wealth deciles by the end of 2026. This paper introduces the expert group and presents first experimental results from a collection exercise conducted in early 2025. We first present the methodology that aligns micro data to the national accounts, enabling results to be comparable with macroeconomic aggregates (such as GDP, household disposable income and household wealth), while also enhancing their timeliness, international comparability, and coverage. Second, the paper presents experimental results for 22 countries based on an intermediate wealth concept (e.g. excluding pensions). We find that wealth is concentrated in the top quintile with the bottom quintile often seeing negative wealth, and that inequality is driven by financial assets, moderated by housing wealth. Wealth is also far more unequally distributed than income and consumption. Housing is the largest asset held by households, followed by deposits and equities and investment fund shares. Using the United States as case study, we also show the importance of employment-related pensions in household wealth and the wealth share of the top 1%.