It’s hard to believe, with my tiny little apartment, an always broken faucet, and continuously being strapped for cash, that I’m living in the world’s wealthiest city…or it all makes complete sense.
But still, I can’t quite wrap my head around the fact that for every 22 people I pass, either walking on the street or in a packed subway car, statistically one of them is a millionaire—although, if I was a millionaire I’d never deal with the MTA again!
This is all according to the recently released 2025 World’s Wealthiest Cities Report from Henley & Partners.
NYC was also crowned the world’s wealthiest city in the 2024 report. However, the city’s amount of millionaires has increased over the last year from 305,700 millionaires to 384,500. Hey, if 78,800 people can get there in a year’s time, so can we!
NYC’s number of billionaires has actually decreased. In 2024, there were 68 billionaires. Now, there are only 66.
The annual World’s Wealthiest Cities Report utilizes New World Wealth’s house database, alongside Henley & Partners’ investment migration data. When discussing ‘wealth,’ the report refers to liquid investable wealth, excluding real estate.
The U.S. dominated the list with eleven cities in the top 50 wealthiest cities. Coming in second place as the world’s wealthiest city behind NYC, is the Bay Area. Los Angeles placed in fifth, followed by Chicago (10th), Houston (17th), Dallas (21st), Seattle (25th), Boston (31st), Miami (32nd), Austin (36th), and Washington D.C. (41st).
Global cities like Tokyo, Singapore, London, Paris, Hong Kong and Sydney all placed within the top 10 wealthiest cities in the world.
Shenzhen (142%), Hangzhou (108%), Dubai (102%), and The Bay Area (98%) saw the greatest percentage increase in millionaires over the last decade. Head of Research at New World Wealth, Andrew Amoils, explains that many of these fast growing wealth hubs are either popular destinations for migrating millionaires or tech hubs on the rise.
“Asia’s top tech hub, Shenzhen is the base city for global tech giants Huawei, Tencent, BYD, DJI and ZTE and has experienced especially strong wealth growth over the past 20 years. It is now arguably the world’s leading city in a number of key tech sub-sectors including computer hardware, electric vehicles, Wi-Fi dongles, mobile phones, flying drones, 5G, energy units and electronics.”
You can explore the full report for yourself online.