Your percentile answers one question: what share of Indian adults hold less wealth than you do. If you are at the 90th percentile, nine in ten hold less. It is a position, not a score, and it moves for two reasons. Either your own net worth changes, or the distribution around you does.
The number tends to surprise people in both directions. Indians in metro cities routinely guess they are around the middle of the pack when they are nowhere near it. The reason is that India's wealth distribution has an enormous base of people holding very little, mostly rural and informal, and a very thin top. That shape pulls thresholds down sharply compared with what a salaried professional in Mumbai or Bengaluru would intuitively expect.
Two sources do almost all the work, and the difference between them matters.
On the World Inequality Lab's 2022-23 figures, the top 1% of Indian adults hold about 40% of total personal wealth, the highest share recorded in the hundred-year series. The top 10% hold roughly two thirds. The bottom half of the population holds around 6% between them. Those shares are the most solid numbers on this page, because they come straight from the published research.
| Group | Share of India's personal wealth (WIL, 2022-23) | Entry point per adult (modelled estimate) |
|---|---|---|
| Top 1% | ~40% | ₹1.5 to ₹1.8 crore (₹2.5 to ₹3 crore per household) |
| Top 10% | ~65% | No published estimate; modelled figures vary too widely to quote |
| Bottom 50% | ~6% | — |
Shares come from the World Inequality Lab's 2022-23 estimates. Entry points are modelled ranges, not official figures, for the reasons explained below. Use the calculator above to see your own position.
There is no official net worth percentile table for India. The government does not publish one. Income tax data gives income brackets, not wealth. So every rupee figure you have seen quoted for the top 1%, including on this site, is derived from a model rather than counted.
You can see how much that matters in the spread. The figure most widely repeated in Indian media puts the top 1% entry point at roughly ₹1.5 crore for an individual. Other models built on the same underlying research put it closer to ₹1.8 crore. Household estimates land higher again, commonly ₹2.5 to ₹3 crore, because Indian households pool assets across four or five people and property is usually jointly held.
A 20% gap between credible estimates of the same threshold is not a rounding error. Treat any single number, from us or anyone else, as a ballpark.
This is the most common reason two people get very different answers for what looks like the same question. The World Inequality Lab measures wealth per adult. AIDIS measures it per household. With an average Indian household of roughly four people and shared ownership of the family home, a household figure will always sit well above an individual one.
The ranking on this page is on a per-adult basis. If you are calculating for a family, divide the combined net worth by the number of adults in it before comparing, or you will place yourself far higher than you actually sit.
FOLO Tip: Where you rank today matters far less than which direction you are moving. FOLO keeps your net worth updating across 500+ sources so you are watching a trend, not recalculating a snapshot once a year.
