£784 billion is what the 350 wealthiest people and families in Britain are worth between them on the Sunday Times Rich List 2026, a rise of 1.4% on the previous year and, by the paper’s own reckoning, about a quarter of UK GDP.
Every figure below comes from that list, published online on 15 May 2026 and in print two days later, the 38th annual edition, compiled under editor Robert Watts, who took over from Philip Beresford in 2017. It ranks people resident in the UK. This piece counts only the entries the Sunday Times files as families or as named sets of siblings and heirs, which is why Sir Len Blavatnik (third, £26.852bn), Idan Ofer (fourth, £24.481bn), Nik Storonsky (seventh, £16.411bn) and Sir Jim Ratcliffe (ninth, £15.194bn) sit above some of the names here and are not in the eight. Yahoo Finance UK reported the number of UK billionaires on the list rose to 157, up from 156. Watts called 2026 “a tale of two exoduses”, citing departures after the tax changes and a growing number of British nationals now resident in Dubai, Switzerland and Monaco. A separate report gave the same combined total as £783.5 billion, so the decimal point is doing a certain amount of work.
1. Sanjay and Dheeraj Hinduja and family: £38bn
First place for a fifth consecutive year, and the first year the names on it are not their father’s. Gopichand “GP” Hinduja, born on a leap day in Iran in February 1940, died in a London hospital on 4 November 2025 at 85, two and a half years after his elder brother Srichand, who died on 17 May 2023 aged 87. The 2026 entry stands at £38bn, up from the £35.304bn recorded against Gopi Hinduja and family in 2025, and the Sunday Times files the source as industry and finance: the Hinduja Group’s interests run from oil to private healthcare to property. Dheeraj Hinduja chairs Ashok Leyland; Sanjay runs Gulf Oil International; their uncles Prakash and Ashok oversee Europe and India respectively. No single successor to Gopichand’s chairmanship has been publicly named, which DNA India has read as the opening for a contest among third-generation contenders, though that is one outlet’s speculation rather than anything the family has said. An earlier court dispute, in which Srichand’s daughters accused their uncles of excluding them from decision-making, was settled, with terms undisclosed. Dynastic tidying is rarely announced as such; over at Exor, John Elkann has spent the year turning the Agnelli empire into cash.
2. David and Simon Reuben and family: £27.971bn
Two brothers born in Bombay to an Iraqi-Jewish family whose father worked in the textile trade, in Britain since the 1950s, and now second in the country on a wealth category the Sunday Times labels, with admirable brevity, “Property and Internet”. David was 83 and Simon 81 as of 2023 reporting. Other outlets have put the family anywhere between roughly £24.9bn and £28bn depending on the valuation date, which is a useful reminder of what these estimates are. The sporting line is the one people repeat: the Reubens joined Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and Amanda Staveley in the 2021 purchase of Newcastle United, with the family stake commonly cited at between 10% and 14%. Forbes records David’s son Jamie, born in May 1987, as a board director of the club. The metals trading, the data centres, the sovereign lending and the London freeholds get far less airtime than St James’ Park.
3. Guy, George, Alannah and Galen Weston and family: £18.939bn
Fifth overall, first among the retailers, and the only entry in the top five whose defining recent act was selling something. Galen Weston Sr., born in Marlow, Buckinghamshire in October 1940, died in April 2021 aged 80; the family sold Selfridges that year to Thailand’s Central Group and Austria’s Signa for a reported £4bn. Fortnum & Mason and Holt Renfrew stayed. Sir Guy Weston chairs Wittington Investments, Alannah Weston was chairwoman of Selfridges Group, and on the Canadian side Galen Weston Jr. holds close to 60% of the listed holding company George Weston, directly and through a chain of holding vehicles, according to the company’s 2026 proxy statement and SEDI filings to August 2026. A department store on Oxford Street is a trophy. A controlling block in a listed parent is an income.
4. Igor and Dmitry Bukhman: £14.260bn
Tenth on the list, and the only fortune in the top ten built on video games, the brothers’ company being Playrix. There is no estate, no third generation and no trust deed to discuss yet, which in this company counts as a novelty.
5. Kirsten Rausing and Jörn Rausing: £12.6bn
Eleventh, with the source given as inheritance and investment in Tetra Pak, the carton business that turned liquid packaging into a global rent. The Rausings are the highest-placed entry on the 2026 list whose money arrived rather than was made, and the £12.6bn is stated to a single decimal place while the names above and below them are itemised down to the million, which tells you something about how confidently anyone can value a private fortune of this vintage. Two siblings, one surname, no operating company to point cameras at.
6. Sir James Dyson and family: £12bn
Thirteenth, filed under industry, and the roundest number in the top fifteen. Every other entry in the table carries three decimal places of apparent precision; Dyson gets a flat twelve. It is the clearest signal the Rich List gives that these are estimates built from company filings and market comparisons rather than audited statements of anyone’s account. The fortune sits in a privately held manufacturer with no public shareholders to satisfy and no obligation to explain the gap between one compiler’s arithmetic and another’s.
7. Lord Bamford and family: £10.318bn
Fourteenth, and the only top-fifteen fortune made from construction machinery: JCB, still family-controlled, still recognisable at 200 yards in yellow. Fourteenth is also the rank the 7th Duke of Westminster occupied on the 2025 list, which is a neat illustration of how a table this steep works. The difference between a dynasty everyone has heard of and one they have seen on a building site is, at this altitude, a few hundred million and a paint colour.
8. Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken and Michel de Carvalho: £10.215bn
Fifteenth, with the source given as inheritance, banking and brewing, which is the Heineken stake and the career that married into it. They close the table used here, and the gap between them and the Hindujas at the top is roughly £27.8bn, which is to say very nearly one entire Reuben fortune. The list is not a ladder. It is a cliff with a viewing platform at the bottom.
Where the Duke of Westminster fits, and why he isn’t in the eight
The obvious question, since he is the name most people reach for first. Hugh Grosvenor, 7th Duke of Westminster, born in London in January 1991, inherited the title and control of the Grosvenor Estate on his father’s death in August 2016, when the estate was estimated at £9 billion. On the 2025 Rich List he ranked 14th at £9.884bn; his 2026 placing is not among the figures verified here, so he is left out rather than guessed at. The structure is the other reason he sits oddly in a ranking of individuals: the Grosvenor wealth is held in trust, of which the Duke is a beneficial owner and chair of trustees rather than the legal owner, an arrangement long noted for what it means at inheritance-tax time. What the trust holds is not in doubt: over 1,500 buildings worldwide, large parts of Mayfair and Belgravia, the Beaumont Hotel, the freehold beneath the American Embassy, the 11,000-acre Eaton Estate in Cheshire, Abbeystead in Lancashire, and land in Scotland and Spain. The Grosvenor Group traces to 1677 and Sir Thomas Grosvenor, 3rd Baronet. The Rich List is 38.
