By Jessica Frank-Keyes
Rishi Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty are worth more than £650m, the Sunday Times Rich List has revealed.
Sunak and Murty came in at 245th on the annual list with a collective value of £651m. This is an increase from £529m in 2023.
The couple are the richest pair to have resided in No10 Downing Street, the paper said, with the majority of their wealth thanks to Murty’s shares in her father’s Bangalore IT firm, Infosys.
Over the past year, their worth grew to almost £590m, the Times reported, far outweighing the Prime Minister’s income.
Rishi Sunak’s net worth
According to Sunak’s tax return, which was published in February, he made £2.2m in 2022-23, with his prime ministerial salary of £151,649 amounting to just 6.5 per cent of the total, amid other sources of income such as returns on investment.
Sunak previously worked as an analyst for investment bank, Goldman Sachs, from 2001 to 2004, before becoming a partner at two hedge funds.
He became MP for Richmond, North Yorkshire, in 2015, and became Chancellor in Boris Johnson’s government in 2020.
It came as the list of the richest people in Great Britain showed that King Charles’ wealth also grew for the year, rising to £610m from £600m
The UK rich list
The list recorded that the number of British billionaires tumbled again, continuing a theme seen in 2023.
The number of billionaires reached a peak of 177 in 2022, before dropping to 171 and falling again to 165 this year, driven by some seeing their private wealth contract amid high borrowing rates and others leaving the country.
Robert Watts, compiler of the rich list, said: “This year’s Sunday Times Rich List suggests Britain’s billionaire boom has come to an end.
“Many of our home-grown entrepreneurs have seen their fortunes fall and some of the global super rich who came here are moving away.
“We’ll have to wait and see whether we have now reached peak billionaire, and what that means for our economy.”
