How much family offices allocate to alternatives, and why

Family offices hold between a third and a half of their portfolios in alternatives, depending on which survey is read and how alternatives are defined. UBS's Global Family Office Report 2026 puts the figure at 42% for the end of 2025, down from 44% in 2024. Goldman Sachs's 2025 Family Office Investment Insights also found 42%, as did BlackRock's 2025 Global Family Office Survey. J.P. Morgan's 2026 Global Family Office Report found 35.5%. Citi's 2025 Global Family Office Report shows 20% in private equity, 14% in real estate, 5% in hedge funds and 3% in private credit, which sums to around 42%. The differences owe more to who was asked and what was counted than to real divergence in behaviour.

The figures side by side

Sources: as linked above. The Citi figure is a sum of the asset classes listed in its allocation tables, not a number Citi itself reports.

Why the numbers differ

Sample composition is the largest factor. Goldman's respondents were 47% Americas, 26% EMEA and 27% APAC, and 67% had net worth of at least $1bn. UBS's 2026 sample was 30% Europe excluding Switzerland, 23% Asia Pacific, 14% Switzerland, 13% Latin America, 12% US and 7% Middle East. J.P. Morgan's was 59% US, yet it reports the lowest alternatives share, partly because 37% of its respondents managed under $250m and smaller offices tend to hold fewer illiquid positions. Within Goldman's sample, private equity alone was 25% in the Americas, 22% in EMEA and 15% in APAC.

Definitions matter almost as much. Campden Wealth's North American figure of 29% covers private equity, venture capital and private credit only. Add real estate and hedge funds, which the other surveys include, and it would sit closer to the others. UBS counts gold, art and commodities as alternatives; Goldman lists commodities separately at 1%. Citi splits real estate into direct holdings (12%) and funds (2%), and some respondents may treat a directly owned building as an operating asset rather than a portfolio position. None of the surveys includes the family's operating business, which UBS reports 77% of families still own.

Averaging method also distorts. Every survey reports a mean of respondent averages, so a handful of offices at 70% alternatives pull the figure up for everyone. Citi's own breakdown shows 43% of its respondents holding concentrated positions in private companies, which is a very different portfolio from the average presented.

The reasons offices give

The stated case is return and diversification. Goldman found that 39% of respondents planned to increase private equity over the following 12 months and 26% planned to increase private credit, while 72% invested in secondaries, up from 60% in 2023. BlackRock found 68% of offices focused on increasing diversification and 32% planning to add private credit, the highest figure for any alternative asset class, with 30% planning to add infrastructure. In Campden Wealth's 2025 Asia-Pacific data, private equity funds returned 8% in 2024, private credit 11% and venture capital minus 5%, against 18% for developed market equities, so the return case did not hold in that year. The longer-run trend in the private equity share is covered in private equity allocation trends.

What a 40% alternatives weight means for liquidity

An office with 42% in alternatives has roughly the same proportion of its balance sheet that cannot be sold at a price of its choosing within a quarter. UBS reports 65% of offices using leverage in some form, and Campden Wealth's North American report found that improving liquidity was the top primary objective for 2025, cited by 48% of offices, ahead of de-risking at 33%. Only 12% named reducing private market exposure as a primary objective. That combination, high alternatives and a stated wish for more liquidity without selling, explains the growth in secondaries, portfolio financing and tighter cash forecasting described in family office liquidity management.

The headline allocation to alternatives is therefore better read as a range of 35% to 45% than as a single number. The differences between surveys are mostly artefacts of sampling and definition, and the direction across all of them is stable rather than rising. What has changed is the composition within the bucket and the attention paid to the liquidity that comes with it. UBS's broader allocation picture is set out in family office asset allocation in 2026.