For a full-time employee in Britain, joining the richest tenth of households would require setting aside every pound earned for 52 years, according to new research that lays bare the steepness of Britain’s wealth ladder. The Resolution Foundation, a think tank, published the findings in October 2025, calculating that a middle-class worker would need to accumulate £1.3 million—about $1.7 million—to cross into the top wealth tier, and that figure assumes no bills are paid at all.
A gap that work alone cannot close
Molly Broome, the report’s lead author and formerly a senior economist at the foundation, explained that the shortfall is structural rather than a matter of personal effort. She noted that the gulf between the middle and the top has grown so wide that a typical full-time employee could save their entire working income and still fall short of the highest rung. Broome also pointed to weak wealth mobility: those who begin life with assets tend to retain them, while those who start without rarely climb far.
The research identifies passive gains as the central force behind the widening divide. Since 2010, people who already owned property or held investments have watched their wealth expand, while wages have not kept pace. That dynamic reinforces the advantage of existing wealth over earned income.
Similar pressures across the Atlantic
The obstacle is not confined to Britain. In the United States, workers estimate they would need at least $2.3 million to consider themselves rich, while separate research puts the price of the traditional American Dream—a suburban house, two children, an annual vacation and a new car—at $4.4 million. According to an Investopedia calculation, that total exceeds what most Americans will earn in their lifetimes by more than $1 million.
With median weekly earnings for full-time US workers at $1,232, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, reaching the $2.3 million threshold would take over 35 years of work before any expenses. Meeting the $4.4 million benchmark would require nearly 70 years of saving every dollar, a span longer than most careers, and that calculation leaves out inflation, financial shocks and the possible effects of automation on future work.
What the numbers reveal
The findings sketch a landscape in which the distance between middle-income and wealthy households is measured not in years of effort but in generations of accumulated assets. For British workers, the message is that a lifetime of wages, even if entirely preserved, may not be enough to change their position on the ladder.