This article lays out how family wealth is distributed in Canada: the net worth brackets by percentile, and a closer look at the top one percent. If you want to see where your own number lands, use the Net Worth Percentile Calculator for Canada first, then come back for the wider picture.
According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, the top 1% of Canadian families hold 25.6% of total wealth, and the top 0.5% hold 20.5%. The concentration is steepest right at the top: a very small number of families account for a large share of everything.
| Family wealth quantile | Share of total wealth |
|---|---|
| Top 0.01% | 5.6% |
| Top 0.1% | 12.1% |
| Top 0.5% | 20.5% |
| Top 1% | 25.6% |
| Top 5% | 43.4% |
| Top 10% | 56.4% |
| Top 20% | 73.5% |
| Middle 40% | 25.3% |
| Bottom 40% | 1.2% |
What stands out in the percentile table below is how much larger the jumps become near the top. Moving from the 99th to the 99.5th percentile takes an extra three million dollars or so, and from 99.8 to 99.9 takes roughly another five million. The further up you go, the harder each step becomes.
In the left column is the percentile, and in the right is the net worth in Canadian dollars needed to reach it.
| Net worth percentile | Net worth |
|---|---|
| 10 | $50,000 |
| 20 | $185,000 |
| 30 | $285,000 |
| 40 | $400,000 |
| 50 | $482,000 |
| 60 | $582,000 |
| 70 | $685,000 |
| 80 | $780,000 |
| 90 | $840,000 |
| 93 | $900,000 |
| 94 | $930,000 |
| 95 | $980,000 |
| 97.5 | $1,500,000 |
| 99 | $9,737,000 |
| 99.5 | $12,800,000 |
| 99.6 | $14,000,000 |
| 99.7 | $15,000,000 |
| 99.8 | $20,000,000 |
| 99.9 | $25,000,000 |
| 99.97 | $30,000,000 |
All dollar amounts are in Canadian dollars.
Highlights of the PBO report on wealth distribution in Canada
- The report focuses on families with wealth above $3 million, and its main purpose is to estimate the top tail of Canada's family wealth distribution.
- The richest families in Canada hold noticeably more wealth than the Survey of Financial Security captures on its own, which is why the PBO built a high net worth estimate on top of it.
- The top one percent of families hold roughly a quarter of Canada's total net worth.
- The combined net worth of the top families rose over the two decades to 2019, tracking the same trend seen in the Forbes billionaire lists over those years.
- There are about 160,600 families in Canada with an average net worth near $6.3 million, up from 159,300 families in 2016.
- Roughly 3 million families hold a net worth of $1 million or more, placing them in the top 20% by wealth.
- About 78,400 families hold $10 million or more, accounting for a 19.3% share of family net worth as of 2019.
- Only about 1,600 families sit in the top 0.01%, with an average net worth near $583 million.
Data sources
Figures are drawn from the Parliamentary Budget Officer high net worth family estimates and Statistics Canada Survey of Financial Security data.
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Jeff Wiener founded Digitcom, a Canadian telecommunications company, in 1991 at age 23 and ran it for 27 years, growing it into an eight-figure business named one of Canada's fastest-growing companies five years running. He sold it to a private equity firm in 2017 and semi-retired at 49. He now invests in multi-family real estate and writes about building wealth, selling a business, and the second act.