Richest Countries in the World 2026, Ranked

Every working morning, about 230,000 people cross into Luxembourg from France, Belgium and Germany. They fill almost half of the country's jobs. In the evening most of them go home again, across a border, and spend their pay somewhere else.

That commute is the first thing to understand about the richest countries in the world. Luxembourg produced $147,252 of output for every resident in 2025, more than any other country with a full-year figure and about ten times the world average. But nearly half the people producing it don't live there. Count only the income that stays in Luxembourg and the figure drops by about a third.

How rich a country is depends on how you measure it. This report ranks the richest countries three ways: by what they produce per person, by what that output buys at home, and by what their people own. Then it follows the money back to where it's earned, in banks, drug factories, gas fields, container ports and casinos. We pulled the GDP and national income series from the World Bank's data service and took each country's sector figures from its own statistics office, ministry or regulator wherever we could reach them. Every figure names the release it came from, and the rankings use 2025 actuals, not forecasts.

Key findings at a glance

• Luxembourg had the highest GDP per person in 2025, $147,252, ahead of Ireland ($131,592) and Switzerland ($114,769). The world average was $14,406 (World Bank, World Development Indicators, July 2026).
• Monaco and Liechtenstein are richer still on their latest figures, $288,002 and $220,167 per person, but those are for 2024 and neither has a 2025 figure yet (World Bank).
• Adjusted for prices, Singapore is the richest country in the world, at $163,354 per person, with Luxembourg ($156,542) and Ireland ($155,089) close behind (World Bank, 2025, purchasing power parity).
• Ireland's national income is only 55% of its GDP. Its statistics office puts modified national income at €334 billion in 2025, against GDP of €602.4 billion (CSO, Annual National Accounts 2025, July 2026).
• Norway's national income is larger than its GDP, because its sovereign wealth fund earns abroad. The fund was worth NOK 22,683 billion on 30 June 2026, about NOK 4 million per resident (Norges Bank Investment Management; our calculation).
• Switzerland has the highest average wealth per adult, $910,382, but Luxembourg has the highest median, $394,005 (UBS, Global Wealth Report 2026).
• Chemicals and pharmaceuticals made up 53% of Swiss exports in 2025, a record CHF 152 billion (Federal Office for Customs and Border Security, January 2026).
• Oil and gas made up 57% of Norway's goods exports in 2025, about NOK 1,000 billion (Norwegianpetroleum.no, March 2026).

The richest countries in the world by GDP per person

GDP per person is the standard measure: everything an economy produces in a year, divided by the people who live there. The figures below are the World Bank's, in US dollars at market exchange rates, from the update it published on 13 July 2026. They're actuals for 2025.

GDP per person, 2025: the ten richest countries with a 2025 figure

Gross domestic product per resident, current US dollars

1. Luxembourg$147,252
2. Ireland$131,592
3. Switzerland$114,769
4. Singapore$98,814
5. Iceland$98,323
6. Norway$94,594
7. United States$90,027
8. Denmark$76,970
9. Macao$75,902
10. Netherlands$73,684
11. World average$14,406

Rank	Country	GDP per person, 2025	Change from 2024	Total GDP, 2025	Population, 2025
1	Luxembourg	$147,252	+6.9%	$101.2B	686,970
2	Ireland	$131,592	+16.6%	$721.7B	5.48M
3	Switzerland	$114,769	+6.6%	$1.04T	9.09M
4	Singapore	$98,814	+4.1%	$603.9B	6.11M
5	Iceland	$98,323	+14.5%	$38.6B	392,404
6	Norway	$94,594	+5.2%	$530.8B	5.61M
7	United States	$90,027	+4.5%	$30.77T	341.8M
8	Denmark	$76,970	+8.4%	$462.5B	6.01M
9	Macao	$75,902	+5.4%	$52.1B	685,900
10	Netherlands	$73,684	+9.2%	$1.33T	18.09M
11	Qatar	$72,525	−4.2%	$215.6B	2.97M

Two things stand out. The first is size. Seven of the top ten have fewer than 6.2 million people, and two of them, Luxembourg and Macao, have fewer than 700,000. The second is the United States. It's the only large country on the list, and its $30.77 trillion economy is more than six times the size of the other nine in the top ten put together.

Read the growth column with care. These are dollar figures. The euro, the Swiss franc and the Icelandic króna all strengthened against the dollar in 2025, so part of Europe's apparent growth is currency rather than output. Ireland's 16.6% is the exception, and the reason is its own section below. Qatar, in eleventh, was the only one of these economies whose GDP per person fell.

Adjusted for prices, the order changes

A dollar goes much further in some of these countries than others. Purchasing power parity (PPP) adjusts for that, asking what each country's output would buy at local prices. On that basis the ranking of the richest countries reshuffles. (Our highest paying countries report shows the same effect on wages.)

Rank	Country	GDP per person at PPP, 2025	GDP per person at market rates
1	Singapore	$163,354	$98,814
2	Luxembourg	$156,542	$147,252
3	Ireland	$155,089	$131,592
4	Macao	$137,031	$75,902
5	Qatar	$128,883	$72,525
6	Norway	$104,044	$94,594
7	Switzerland	$102,513	$114,769
8	Guyana	$97,899	$32,414
9	Brunei	$92,430	$32,235
10	United States	$90,027	$90,027

Singapore moves to first, and Macao and Qatar jump into the top five, because prices there are low relative to what they produce. Switzerland falls from third to seventh for the opposite reason: it's one of the most expensive places in the world to live.

The newcomer is Guyana. Offshore oil began flowing in December 2019, and by 2025 its GDP per person at PPP had reached $97,899, up 22% in a single year. At market rates it's $32,414, and much of that oil output belongs to the foreign companies that produce it. Which raises the question the next section is about.

When GDP flatters a country

GDP counts everything produced inside a country's borders, whoever owns it. Gross national income (GNI) counts only the income that belongs to residents. It subtracts the wages paid to workers who live abroad and the profits paid out to foreign owners, and adds whatever residents earn from investments overseas. For most countries the two are close. For a few of the richest, they aren't.

National income as a share of GDP, 2025

Gross national income per person divided by GDP per person, both at purchasing power parity

1. Norway104%
2. Denmark103%
3. United States99%
4. Switzerland99%
5. Qatar98%
6. Singapore83%
7. Guyana82%
8. Ireland69%
9. Luxembourg68%

Country	GDP per person, PPP	GNI per person, PPP	GNI as a share of GDP
Luxembourg	$156,542	$106,640	68%
Ireland	$155,089	$106,310	69%
Guyana	$97,899	$80,300	82%
Singapore	$163,354	$135,750	83%
Qatar	$128,883	$126,290	98%
Switzerland	$102,513	$101,690	99%
United States	$90,027	$89,490	99%
Denmark	$83,218	$85,460	103%
Norway	$104,044	$107,770	104%

Luxembourg loses about a third between the two measures. Most of it goes on the paycheques of the 230,000 people who commute in and the profits of the foreign-owned banks and funds based there. It remains one of the richest countries in the world on either count.

Ireland is the extreme case, and its own statisticians say so. Many of the world's largest pharmaceutical and technology companies book profits in Ireland, and those profits count in Irish GDP even though they belong to shareholders elsewhere. The Central Statistics Office publishes a measure that strips this out, modified gross national income, or GNI*. For 2025 it was €334 billion, 55.4% of GDP of €602.4 billion. On our arithmetic that's about €61,000 ($68,800) per resident, which would take Ireland out of the top ten altogether. The CSO's figures also explain that 16.6% jump: sectors dominated by multinationals grew 14.5% in real terms in 2025, while the domestic economy grew 2.2%.

Singapore sits in between. Its Ministry of Trade and Industry puts 2025 GDP at S$789.5 billion and GNI at S$656 billion, with S$133 billion more flowing out in factor income than came in.

Norway and Denmark go the other way. Both own more abroad than foreigners own in them, so their residents' income is larger than what's produced at home. In Norway's case, most of that is a single fund.

How much are the richest countries worth?

Measured by what their people own, Switzerland is the richest country in the world, with average wealth of $910,382 per adult at the end of 2025. Measured by the typical adult, it's Luxembourg, with a median of $394,005 (UBS, Global Wealth Report 2026).

GDP is a flow: what a country produces in a year. Wealth is a stock: what its people own, in homes, savings, pensions and shares, minus what they owe. UBS publishes the most widely used comparison of it every summer, and its 2026 edition, released on 30 June, covers wealth at the end of 2025. Global personal wealth rose 10.8% in dollar terms that year.

The average is one way to rank it. The median is the wealth of the adult exactly in the middle, and it's usually the better guide to how a typical person is doing, because the very rich pull the average up.

Country	Average wealth per adult	Median wealth per adult
Switzerland	$910,382	about $146,000
United States	$696,277	about $69,000
Luxembourg	$654,732	$394,005
Hong Kong	$648,267	about $188,000
Australia	$616,306	$210,783
Singapore	about $527,000	about $96,000
Norway	about $425,000	about $140,000
Ireland	about $314,000	about $98,000
Qatar	about $189,000	about $95,000

Figures given exactly are from UBS's own release, which publishes the top five on each measure. Figures marked "about" come from published coverage of the report's full tables.

The two columns tell different stories. Switzerland's average is the highest in the world, but its median is about a sixth of that. The typical American adult holds about $69,000, roughly a tenth of the US average, which says more about how American wealth is distributed than any GDP figure can. Luxembourg is the opposite: its median is 60% of its average, and it's the highest median of any country UBS covers. The next four medians belong to Belgium ($277,166), Australia, New Zealand ($206,617) and Denmark ($203,771), none of which makes the GDP top five.

Qatar has an average of about $189,000 per adult despite the fifth-highest GDP per person in the world at PPP. The oil and gas wealth there belongs largely to the state, not to households, so it doesn't show up in personal wealth. That's true of Norway too, which is why the next section exists.

The savings accounts: sovereign wealth funds

Some of the richest countries hold their wealth publicly, in funds that invest the proceeds of oil, gas or budget surpluses for future generations.

Norway's Government Pension Fund Global is the largest. It was worth NOK 22,683 billion on 30 June 2026, according to Norges Bank Investment Management, which runs it. That's about NOK 4 million for every person in Norway, or around $2.2 trillion at 2025's average exchange rate. It returned 9.4% in the first half of 2026, and 72.1% of it is invested in shares, spread across thousands of companies worldwide. The state's net cash flow from petroleum, NOK 664 billion in 2025, is what fills it.

Singapore's Temasek reported a net portfolio value of S$518 billion at 31 March 2026, up S$49 billion on the year, or roughly $396 billion at 2025's exchange rate. Singapore's other state investor, GIC, doesn't disclose its size, and neither do the large Gulf funds in Qatar and Abu Dhabi. Estimates of those circulate widely. We haven't repeated them, for reasons set out at the end.

Where the money comes from

Rich countries get rich in very different ways. Here is where each of the leaders earns its living, with the one number that best shows it.

Country	Main source of income	The number
Luxembourg	Financial services	30% of national value added (2024)
Ireland	Foreign-owned multinationals	GDP €602.4B, national income €334B (2025)
Switzerland	Chemicals and pharmaceuticals	CHF 152B, 53% of exports (2025)
Singapore	Wholesale trade, manufacturing, finance	19.7%, 18.5% and 14.0% of value added (2025)
Norway	Oil and gas	About NOK 1,000B, 57% of goods exports (2025)
Qatar	Oil and gas	33.8% of GDP (fourth quarter of 2025)
Macao	Casinos	43.3% of value added (2024)
Iceland	Tourism, fishing, aluminium	37%, 21% and 18% of exports (2024)

Luxembourg: finance, and other people's commutes

Luxembourg's financial sector generated €17.3 billion of value added in 2024, 30% of the national total, according to Luxembourg for Finance, the financial centre's promotion agency. Investment funds domiciled there manage €7.4 trillion of assets, and the sector paid €7.2 billion in tax in 2024. The work is done by a workforce that is 47% cross-border, and only one employee in four is a Luxembourg national (STATEC, April 2026). The country also pays the second-highest average wage in the OECD, $98,530 at PPP in 2025.

Ireland: the multinationals' balance sheet

Ireland's official figures separate the economy in two. Sectors dominated by foreign-owned multinationals grew 14.5% in 2025; the rest of the economy grew 2.2% (CSO, July 2026). The multinational half is why Irish GDP per person looks like Luxembourg's. The domestic half is why the CSO publishes GNI* at all.

Switzerland: medicine, mostly

Swiss exports reached a record CHF 287.0 billion in 2025. Chemicals and pharmaceuticals were CHF 152 billion of that, a 53% share and also a record. Antisera and vaccines alone added CHF 5.5 billion on the year (Federal Office for Customs and Border Security, 29 January 2026). Watches, the export most people picture, fell 1.7%.

Singapore: the trading post that makes chips

Singapore earns its living from being in the middle of things. In 2025, wholesale trade was 19.7% of the economy's value added, manufacturing 18.5%, and finance and insurance 14.0% (Ministry of Trade and Industry, Economic Survey of Singapore 2025). Transport and storage added another 8.1%. Real GDP grew 5.0%, led by manufacturing, where demand for AI-related electronics pushed output up 8.7%.

Norway: oil and gas, turned into shares

Crude oil, natural gas and condensate brought in about NOK 1,000 billion in 2025, 57% of the value of all Norwegian goods exports (Norwegianpetroleum.no, March 2026). The government's net cash flow from the sector was NOK 664 billion. Almost none of it is spent directly. It goes into the fund, and the budget draws on the fund's returns instead.

Qatar: gas

In Qatar, mining and quarrying means oil and, above all, natural gas. The sector accounted for 33.8% of GDP in the fourth quarter of 2025, according to reporting of the National Planning Council's quarterly figures. The other 66.2% grew 4.5% on the year, while hydrocarbon output shrank 2.4%. Diversification is real, but a third of the economy still rises and falls with the price of gas.

Macao: casinos

Gaming accounted for 43.3% of Macao's gross value added in 2024, according to its Statistics and Census Service, down from 51.1% in 2019. Casino gross gaming revenue reached MOP 247.4 billion in 2025, the highest since the pandemic began but still only 84.6% of the 2019 total. The government collected about MOP 94.9 billion in gaming tax, according to reporting of figures from the city's gaming regulator.

Iceland: fish, aluminium and visitors

Iceland earns its foreign income from three things. In 2024, tourism was 37% of the value of exports of goods and services and marine products 21%, according to the US Commerce Department's country guide. Manufactured goods made up another 18%, most of it aluminium smelted with hydro and geothermal power.

The United States: scale

The US doesn't fit the pattern, and that's the point. It's the one country in the top ten whose wealth doesn't come from a niche. At $30.77 trillion in 2025, its economy is about a quarter of the world's $118.4 trillion total, spread across every industry there is.

What the richest countries have in common

Set side by side, the richest countries fall into three groups.

Hubs. Luxembourg, Ireland and Singapore are rich partly because other people's money passes through them: fund assets, multinational profits, re-exports. Their GDP per person is real, but a large share of it belongs to someone else, and GNI shows how much.

Resource owners. Norway, Qatar, Brunei and now Guyana are rich because of what's under their seabed. What separates them is what they do with it. Norway has turned more than 50 years of oil into a fund worth about NOK 4 million per person.

Specialists. Switzerland and Macao earn outsized incomes from one industry each, medicines and casinos. Iceland does it with three.

The United States is the exception on every count: large, diversified, and still in the top ten.

Being a rich country and paying well aren't the same thing. Ireland is second on GDP per person but twelfth among OECD countries on average wages, and Iceland is fifth here but first on pay. Our report on the highest paying countries compares average wages, minimum wages and what the top 1% earn across the same economies.

What we could not verify

• 2025 figures for Monaco, Liechtenstein and the United Arab Emirates. None appears with a 2025 value in the World Bank's July 2026 update. Monaco and Liechtenstein are shown on their 2024 figures and are not ranked.
• The size of GIC, the Qatar Investment Authority and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. None publishes a total. Tracker estimates run to hundreds of billions of dollars each and vary widely, so we have not quoted them.
• Luxembourg's finance share at source. Luxembourg for Finance puts the sector at €17.3 billion, 30% of national value added. Those two numbers imply a national total of about €58 billion, well below the size of Luxembourg's economy in the World Bank's figures. We read the report through press coverage and could not reconcile the two, so treat 30% as the top of the plausible range.
• Qatar's full-year 2025 sector split. The 33.8% figure is for the fourth quarter, taken from reporting of the National Planning Council's release rather than the release itself.
• Macao's 2025 industrial structure. The Statistics and Census Service publishes it each November. The 2024 structure is the latest available.
• Wealth figures outside UBS's top five. Figures marked "about" come from coverage of the Global Wealth Report's tables, which we could not read in full.
• 2026 GDP per person. The IMF publishes projections for 2026, and most rankings in circulation use them. We have used 2025 actuals instead, and will update when the 2026 actuals are published in mid-2027.

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