The top 1% of Canadian economic families hold 24% of the country’s total net wealth and the top 10% hold 53% of it, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s (PBO) 2023 high-net-worth families database.
The top 1% in 2023 was made up of approximately 169,400 families, each with a net wealth of at least $7.4 million. The PBO projects these numbers have grown to 176,800 families with a minimum net wealth of $7.5 million in the last quarter of 2024.
During the 2025 federal election, there multiple proposals related to high-net-worth families and wealth taxes, so the PBO had to update its database to cost those proposals. The PBO used information from Statistics Canada’s survey of financial security (SFS) and Maclean’s 2024 list of Canada’s richest people, among others.
The 2023 numbers suggest a slightly lower wealth concentration among high-net-worth families since 2019. The share of wealth held by the top 5% largely followed the same trends.
This was true in data constructed using SFS and the Forbes billionaires list, and the PBO data constructed using SFS, Forbes and the Canadian Business or Maclean’s billionaires list.
However, the PBO notes there are significant sources of uncertainty in the data. For example, the Forbes dataset does not contain a consistent list of individuals in all years. This means that the 2023 estimate derived from Forbes may underestimate the true wealth concentration. In addition, the SFS does not have sufficient sample sizes to estimate the net worth of the top 1%, and there is significant sampling uncertainty involved.
Billionaires vs. millionaires
While there were 4.4 million families in Canada with net wealth above $1 million and 108,000 families with net wealth above $10 million, only about 100 families cross the billion-dollar threshold. Families with over $1 billion in net wealth collectively own 2.2% of national wealth, or $360 billion.
The top 10% had at least $2 million in net assets, the top 1% at least $7.4 million and the top 0.01% at least $171.5 million per family in 2023. Meanwhile, the middle 40% had between $300,000 and $1.3 million.
Asset types
While the PBO’s data does not contain doesn’t break down asset categories, Statistics Canada’s SFS does.
Economic families in the top 5% collectively had 29.3% of Canada’s net wealth in 2023. They also owned 6.4% of the nation’s financial assets without pensions, 5.1% of pensions, 14% of non-financial assets, 5.7% of business equity and 1.8% of the country’s debt.