Want to join Belgium’s wealthiest 10%? You need at least €1.16 million in wealth, and those who do own more than half of everything in Belgium.
According to new figures published on Monday by the National Bank of Belgium (NBB), the richest 10% of Belgian households held 54.4% of total household wealth in the first quarter of 2026.
By contrast, the poorest half of households shared just 7.7%.
In total, Belgian households owned around €3.1 trillion in net wealth, a figure that includes property, savings and investments minus mortgages, loans and other debts.
€1.16 million entry ticket
The €1.16 million threshold is almost twice the average household wealth of €610,000.
But, averages can be deceptive, as a relatively small number of wealthy households pull the figure upwards. The median gives another picture: the household in the middle of the wealth distribution owns around €287,000.
So, a household needs roughly four times the wealth of the median household to break into the top 10%.
A gap of 35 to 1
The gap between the richest and poorest households is stark. Based on the NBB's figures, a household in the top 10% owns around €3.3 million on average. In the poorest half, the average is about €94,000.
To put it simply: for every euro of wealth held by a household in the bottom 50%, a household in the top 10% holds roughly €35 on average.
Credit: National Bank of Belgium
The richest lost ground, but so did the poorest
The richest 10% now own a slightly smaller slice of the pie than in the NBB's previous figures, down from about 55.5% to 54.4%.
But the poorest half's slice shrank too, from 8.2% to 7.7%.
The only group whose slice has grown was in the middle: the 40% of households who are neither the poorest nor the richest saw their share grow from about 36% to 38% of all wealth in Belgium.
However, because the poorest fell further behind, overall inequality still edged up.
The NBB measures this with the Gini coefficient, a score from 0, where every household owns the same, to 100, where one household owns everything. Belgium's score rose from 68.5 to 68.8.
For all its concentration at the top, Belgium remains less unequal than the eurozone as a whole, where the Gini score stands at 73.1%.
