Wealth tax
levy on the total value of personal assets, including owner-occupied housing; cash, bank deposits, money funds, and savings in insurance and pension plans
A wealth tax, also called a capital tax, equity tax, or net wealth tax, is a tax on an entity's holdings of assets or an entity's net worth. This includes the total value of personal assets, including cash, bank deposits, real estate, assets in insurance and pension plans, ownership of unincorporated businesses, financial securities, and personal trusts (a one-off levy on wealth is a capital levy).
Typically, wealth taxation involves excluding an individual's liabilities, such as mortgages and other debts, from their total assets. Accordingly, this type of taxation is often referred to as a net wealth tax. As of 2017, five of the 36 OECD countries had a personal wealth tax (down from 12 in 1990). Proponents argue that wealth taxes can reduce income inequality by making it harder for individuals to accumulate large amounts of wealth. Wealth taxes have been criticized because they reduce economic growth, disincentivize entrepreneurship, encourage capital flight, and raise little revenue despite their high administrative costs.
OECD countries with a wealth tax
The Global Revenue Statistics Database presents a roster of countries with documented instances of wealth-tax revenue (the data is limited to 1965–2021). A total of eight countries (Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland) were known to have collected revenue through a wealth tax in 1965. In the ensuing decades, the number of countries reporting wealth tax revenue increased gradually.
The public source identifies “Wealth tax” as levy on the total value of personal assets, including owner-occupied housing; cash, bank deposits, money funds, and savings in insurance and pension plans. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Wealth, levy and total.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q967719. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2017, 1990, 1965 and 2021.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wealth tax” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.