The next generation in numbers

Last reviewed: August 2026

In brief. The verified picture in 2026: a $124 trillion US wealth transfer is under way, only about half of family offices have a succession plan, 85% of next gens feel ready while 39% of family offices agree, and affluent adolescents show clinically significant distress at rates well above national norms.

Each figure below carries a reading (what it actually measures) and an insight (what it means for the person under the inheritance); the page closes with a guide to reading statistics in this field. The concepts behind the numbers are explained on what shapes an heir's identity and across heiridentity.com.

How large is the transfer the next generation is standing under?

$124 trillion is projected to change hands in the United States through 2048, with $105 trillion flowing to heirs. Source: Cerulli Associates, press release, December 2024 (cerulli.com).

• Reading: a projection, US only, built on modelling of household balance sheets and mortality; $18 trillion of the total goes to charity. More than half the volume ($62 trillion) comes from high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth households, roughly 2% of all households.
• Insight: the transfer is concentrated in a small population of families, which means a small population of heirs absorbing very large expectations.

In the year covered by UBS's 2023 billionaire report, heirs gained more new billionaire wealth than entrepreneurs did: $150.8 billion inherited by 53 heirs, against $140.7 billion created by 84 self-made new billionaires. Source: UBS Billionaire Ambitions Report 2023 (ubs.com).

• Reading: the first time inheritance outweighed entrepreneurship in the nine editions of the report to that date; a single-year observation at the extreme top of the wealth distribution. The same report projected more than 1,000 billionaires passing about $5.2 trillion to children over the coming decades.
• Insight: at the very top, the defining economic act of a generation is shifting from building to receiving, and identity follows economics: a cohort whose central fact is inheritance meets this site's question at scale.

How ready is anyone, and who believes it?

85% of next-generation members from ultra-wealthy families say they feel prepared for succession; only 39% of family offices agree. Source: BNY Mellon Wealth Management and Campden Wealth study of 102 next gens from families averaging $752 million in net worth (2022); family-office figure from Campden Wealth's Global Family Office Report 2022, cited in the same release (prnewswire.com).

• Reading: two self-report surveys with small, self-selected samples; they measure perception on both sides and leave competence unmeasured; the 46-point gap is between felt and attributed readiness.
• Insight: either the heirs or the family offices are wrong. If the heirs are, confidence is masking unpreparedness; if the family offices are, capable successors are being doubted by the system meant to back them, without anyone saying so. That doubt is audible, and it corrodes exactly the earned legitimacy heirs already struggle to build.

53% of family offices worldwide have a wealth succession plan; only 26% involve the next generation in it from the start, and 35% do not involve them at all. Source: UBS Global Family Office Report 2025, survey of 317 family offices (ubs.com).

• Reading: self-reported governance data from a non-random sample; "plan" covers documents of very different quality. The rate rose from 47% the year before.
• Insight: for most heirs, the succession is a plan about them written without them: a quarter are consulted from the outset, a third learn their future second-hand. That is the administrative face of identity foreclosure: commitments drafted on your behalf, delivered as settled.

In North America, 69% of family offices now report having a succession plan, up from 53% a year earlier; 47% expect control to pass to the next generation within a decade, 22% within five years. Source: RBC and Campden Wealth, North America Family Office Report 2025 (rbcwealthmanagement.com).

• Reading: regional data, same self-report caveats; the sharp one-year rise suggests planning is accelerating as principals age.
• Insight: nearly half of these transitions land within ten years; the identity question has a due date.

Only 34% of US family businesses have a robust, documented and communicated succession plan, though 72% want the business to stay in the family. Source: PwC US Family Business Survey (2021 edition) (pwc.com).

• Reading: "robust, documented and communicated" is a deliberately high bar; informal plans are more common.
• Insight: most heirs inherit an expectation without a map. Families want continuity twice as often as they plan for it, and the gap is filled by assumption, which lands on the next generation as a role nobody explicitly designed.

PwC's Global NextGen Survey 2024 gathered 917 interviews across 63 territories; in Asia-Pacific, 76% of next-generation members reported low trust between their generation and the current one. Source: PwC Global NextGen Survey 2024, Asia-Pacific highlights (mynewsdesk.com).

• Reading: a regional and perceptual figure (Singapore was 80%); a comparable global percentage was not publicly available at the time of writing.
• Insight: where measured, the relational field around succession is strained on the successor's side. Identity work is harder inside low trust, because exploration reads as defection and doubt as disloyalty.

What does research say about growing up affluent?

In one affluent suburban sample, 22% of girls reported clinically significant depressive symptoms. Source: Luthar and Becker, "Privileged but Pressured? A Study of Affluent Youth", Child Development, 2002 (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov).

• Reading: one cohort of 302 sixth and seventh graders in a wealthy US suburb; symptoms measured by screening instruments, without clinical interviews. The study linked distress to achievement pressure (especially perfectionism) and isolation from parents.
• Insight: this is the finding that launched this literature. Distress in wealthy adolescence is not rare, and its two named drivers, pressure and distance, are precisely the conditions a legacy system generates.

Across the research programme of Suniya Luthar and colleagues, adolescents in affluent, high-achieving contexts show serious symptoms at rates she summarises as at least two to three times national averages. Sources: Luthar, Child Development, 2003; Luthar and Latendresse, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2005; Luthar, Barkin and Crossman, Development and Psychopathology, 2013; the multiplier as Luthar has summarised it in public coverage of her work (Psychology Today, 2021).

• Reading: a summary across cohorts and outcomes, with no single effect size behind it; exact multiples vary by sample, sex and measure. The 2013 review documents the elevation formally.
• Insight: the popular assumption runs one way (money protects children) and the evidence runs the other. If adolescence inside affluence felt harder than it was supposed to, the data are on your side. The mechanism is explained in "I can, therefore I must".

In 2019, a US National Academies consensus report added youth in "high-achieving schools" to its list of at-risk groups, alongside young people affected by poverty, trauma and discrimination. Source: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine consensus report (2019), as reported by multiple outlets (chconline.org).

• Reading: an institutional risk designation driven by excessive pressure to excel in largely affluent contexts; it lists both as risk environments, without equating affluence with poverty.
• Insight: the environments that produce heirs (selective schools, high expectations, performance cultures) are formally recognised risk settings; the pre-written life has an institutional paper trail.

What does identity research add?

Identity statuses keep moving: across longitudinal studies, roughly 36% of people made progressive identity-status changes, 15% regressive, and 49% stayed stable. Source: Kroger, Martinussen and Marcia, meta-analysis of 124 studies, Journal of Adolescence, 2010 (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov).

• Reading: aggregated across mostly adolescent and young-adult samples; "progressive" means movement towards exploration and owned commitment. The proportion in identity achievement keeps rising across young adulthood.
• Insight: foreclosure is a position people move out of. Half of measured people moved status, and movement forward was more than twice as common as movement back. For an heir who never got an exploration phase the window does not close; our reflection tool is built on that premise.

Exploration has a counterfeit: ruminative exploration, circling without resolution, which is empirically distinct from adaptive exploration and linked to distress. Source: Luyckx et al., Journal of Research in Personality, 2008.

• Reading: from the five-dimensional model of identity formation underlying the DIDS questionnaire, validated across multiple countries.
• Insight: "I think about this constantly" is not the same as "I am exploring". The distinction matters for heirs, whose questioning often runs for years without a single test.

What about the famous 70% and 30% figures?

Two numbers dominate this field's slide decks, and both deserve honest handling.

"70% of wealth transfers fail." Origin: Williams and Preisser, Preparing Heirs (2003), from the authors' 20-year practitioner survey of 3,250 families. Within the reported failures, 60% were attributed to breakdown of communication and trust in the family, 25% to inadequately prepared heirs, 15% to lack of a shared mission, and fewer than 5% to professional or structural errors.

• Reading: practitioner-collected data without peer review; "failure" is defined broadly (involuntary loss of assets or of family harmony after transition); the sample and methods are not fully published. The headline number is contested; never quote it as settled science.
• Insight: the durable value is the ordering behind the 70%. Even as a rough practitioner census, it locates failure inside relationships and preparation, while most planning effort goes into legal and tax engineering. Fewer than one failure in twenty traced to technical error: that is the sentence worth keeping.

"Only 30% of family businesses survive into the second generation." Origin: John Ward, Keeping the Family Business Healthy (1987), a historical analysis of 200 Illinois manufacturing firms from 1924 to 1984 (knowledge.insead.edu).

• Reading: one regional manufacturing cohort from one era, generalised far beyond its data. "Non-survival" includes healthy exits, sales and mergers, which are strategic choices; the label counts families that got the outcome they wanted.
• Insight: heirs are routinely recruited into succession under statistical mood music implying near-certain doom unless they comply with the plan. The evidence behind the doom is thinner and older than its ubiquity suggests. Scepticism here is accuracy.

What do clinicians see?

Jan Gerber, founder of Paracelsus Recovery, has stated that close to 40% of the clients the clinic supports grew up in extremely affluent households. Source: Gerber's public essay on succession syndrome (jangerber.com).

• Reading: a clinic-reported observation about one specialised clinic's client mix, stated by its founder; it describes a caseload, and a clinic serving wealthy clients will naturally see many raised-in-wealth clients. Its value is as a front-line signal, on the record.
• Insight: at the treatment end of the pipeline, people raised inside significant wealth are a large minority of the caseload. The clinical pattern between adolescence and that caseload is described in succession syndrome explained.

How to read statistics about heirs and succession

A short filter helps.

1. Ask who was sampled. "Next gens" in most surveys means a few hundred self-selected respondents reachable through wealth managers. That is a partial view of the group.
2. Ask what was measured. Readiness, trust and preparedness are almost always self-reported perception. The 85% versus 39% gap above is two perceptions disagreeing, which is itself the finding.
3. Ask who paid. Much succession data is produced by institutions that sell succession services. It can still be sound; it should still be read with the incentive in view.
4. Separate observation from prevalence. A clinic's 40% describes its caseload; a projection's $124 trillion describes a model. Neither is a population rate, and treating them as such is how folklore starts.
5. Watch for laundered classics. The 70% and 30% figures show how a dated, narrow finding becomes an eternal fact through repetition. When a number appears without a year, a sample and a definition, assume it has been travelling unaccompanied for some time.

Frequently asked questions

What is the single most reliable number on this page?

The Cerulli projection is the most rigorously modelled; the Kroger meta-analysis, aggregating 124 studies, is the most scientifically robust. The readiness and trust figures are softer: honestly collected, but small-sample and perceptual. Reliability here means knowing what kind of number you are holding.

Is there a verified percentage of heirs who experience an identity crisis?

No, and this page will not invent one. Identity foreclosure rates in heir populations have not been directly measured in published research. What exists is strong adjacent evidence: elevated distress in affluent adolescence, documented succession-planning exclusion, and clinical observation of the adult pattern. The honest statement is that the mechanism is well evidenced and the prevalence unmeasured.

Why do the family-office numbers differ between surveys (53% versus 69% with plans)?

Different samples, regions and years: the 53% is global (UBS, 2025), the 69% is North American (RBC and Campden Wealth, 2025), and North American planning rates rose sharply that year. The direction is consistent across sources: planning is spreading, and next-generation involvement lags behind it.

About this site. heiridentity.com is an independent educational resource on the heir identity crisis. It is published by the team at Paracelsus Recovery, a Swiss mental-health clinic, as part of its public-education work. Content draws on the published research cited throughout and is not a substitute for professional advice.