How is wealth distributed across British households? : reassessing the valuation of pensions

Reliable statistics on the distribution of wealth - and how this has changed over time - are essential for informing a range of policy debates. Unfortunately, current official statistics from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) do not provide a coherent or consistent guide to how wealth is distributed. They are based on the Wealth and Assets Survey (WAS) - the only dataset aiming to comprehensively measure the distribution of wealth in Great Britain - yet they contain important inconsistencies over time. These inconsistencies arise due to the recent methodological changes to the valuation of households' private pension wealth, introduced in Round 8 of the data (covering 2020-22), but not applied to previous versions of data (covering 2006 to 2020). In addition, both before and after the methodological changes, the ONS values much of private pension wealth in a way that is fundamentally incompatible with how other assets are valued in the survey (as first pointed out in Adam et al. (2025)). This results in inconsistent comparisons for groups who hold more and less of their wealth in these types of pensions, distorting the measured distribution of wealth. In this report, we propose an improved measure of private pension wealth (the single largest component of household wealth in Great Britain) that can be calculated coherently and consistently over time in WAS. We apply this measure to all editions of the data to uncover new insights about how wealth is distributed across Great Britain, and how this has changed over time.