The UK Wealth Timeline, 1995–2025

Infographic #1 · 2026-10-31 · how it was built

The UK Wealth Timeline, 1995–2025 — how it was built

An animated 30-year timeline of UK household wealth: the pool grows

from £2.6 trillion to over £11 trillion, while the top 10% pull

further ahead. Every number is real, every source is named, and the

projection is drawn dashed because it is a projection.

What prompted it

Wealth inequality is usually shown as a static pie chart in a PDF. The thing that makes it land — watching the gap widen year by year, with the actual pound values climbing — almost never survives the

trip into print. We wanted one animation where the areas you see are

literally proportional to the £ values, so the audience can watch

both the growth and the concentration happen at once.

What it shows

1. The pool forms. UK household-sector net worth (ONS National Balance Sheet, series CGRC), 1995–2025: £2.6tn → £11.2tn. 2. The split. The pool divides into the top 10% of individuals vs the other 90% (World Inequality Database, UK top-10% share). 3. Year-by-year growth. The animation steps through each year with the real total on screen. 4. The share race. The top-10% share climbs from ~52.6% (1995) to 57.1% (2024) — and we show the ONS Wealth & Assets Survey household measure (43–45%, method break flagged) alongside, because the two measures are genuinely different and both are published. 5. The projection. 2026–2027, drawn dashed with an uncertainty band: last WID share held constant ±1pp, total wealth extrapolated at the last-decade CAGR ±2pp/yr. Trend extrapolation, not a forecast — and labelled as such on screen. 6. The verdict. What the numbers say, what would falsify the projection, and every source.

Method

• Data: data/wealth-uk.json — 31 annual rows assembled from ONS

and WID.world publications (see the source key below). Annual WAS shares are linear interpolations between biennial survey rounds (flagged per row in the data; the animation uses WID as its main share series precisely because it is annual and continuous).

• Honest caveats baked into the visual: the 2020–22 WAS round has a

pension-methodology break (SCAPE discounting), so the WAS 45%→41% drop is partly methodological; WID (57%) and WAS (~41–45%) measure different things (individual net personal wealth vs GB household survey wealth) and are both real published numbers.

• Rendering: hand-written SVG animated with requestAnimationFrame

in ~600 lines of vanilla JS. No libraries, no build step. Pool areas are proportional to £ values (radius = sqrt(value)) so the visual is honest at every frame. prefers-reduced-motion skips to the final state instantly.

Data sources

• ONS Wealth & Assets Survey, Tables 2.1 & 2.2 ("Total Wealth:

Wealth in Great Britain" dataset, released 24 Jan 2025) — aggregate wealth and decile breakdowns, 9 survey rounds 2006–08 → 2020–22.

• ONS National Balance Sheet (release 10 June 2026), household

sector net worth, series CGRC — the annual 1995–2025 total-wealth series. Via DBnomics.

• ONS bulletins (2025, 2022, 2018) — cross-checks: top-10% 41%

(2020–22), 43% (2018–20), 44–45% earlier rounds; top-1% = 10%.

• World Inequality Database (retrieved 2026) — UK top-10%

individual wealth share, 1995–2024 annual. Via Our World in Data grapher CSV.

• Full per-figure traceability: data/sources.md in the repo.

What would falsify the projection

• WAS rounds adopting the updated pension methodology retrospectively

revising the top-10% share rather than the level.

• A WID methodology revision to UK capitalization factors (top shares

are sensitive to assumed returns).

• Policy shocks (wealth taxes, major pension reform) — the projection

assumes none, which is exactly why it stops at 2 years.

*Built as Infographic #1 — the point was to prove the platform (template + data + animation) works end to end on real data.*

▶ Watch the animation