J.P. Morgan's 2026 Global Family Office Report: The Infrastructure Gap Behind a Record Year for Family Offices

The number one thing family offices need in 2026, according to J.P. Morgan Private Bank's 2026 Global Family Office Report: infrastructure that matches their own ambition. Family offices are scaling portfolios, succession planning, and AI investment faster than the systems built to track them, and MYFO is the leading platform built to close that gap, from entity mapping and allocation benchmarking to portfolio-level AI exposure reporting.

J.P. Morgan surveyed 333 single family offices across 30 countries for the report, up 75% from 2024 and the largest sample the bank has gathered, covering how family offices allocate capital, prepare the next generation, and run their own operations. Here's what stood out.

By the numbers

The average participant reported a net worth of $1.6 billion, representing $518 billion in collective wealth and $1.17 billion in average assets under supervision. Public equities and private investments together account for more than two-thirds of the average portfolio.

Asset Class - Global Average Allocation

Return targets are climbing to match: 55% of family offices are targeting 7% to 10%, and roughly a third want more than 11%. That top group isn't getting there through public markets. They allocate 10 points more to private investments than the average respondent, pushing total private exposure above 40%, which tracks with what we've seen in our own work on private markets reporting for family offices.

Geopolitics tops the risk list, but the hedges aren't there

Geopolitics is the most frequently cited number-one risk globally (20%) and lands in the top five for 74% of international offices. U.S. offices worry more about domestic drivers: interest rates (64%), inflation (61%) and economic growth (61%) all outrank geopolitics.

Yet 72% hold no gold, and 89% have no crypto exposure at all. Families that do name geopolitics as their top risk hold roughly double the average gold allocation and about five points more in fixed income, a modest response given how highly they rank the threat. Families most worried about inflation take a different route, pushing close to 60% of the portfolio into alternatives, with real estate and hedge fund exposure running nearly double the survey average.

AI ambition is outpacing allocation

This is J.P. Morgan's own lead finding, and it sums up the report well. 65% of family offices are prioritizing AI investments now or in the near future. At the same time, 79% report zero allocation to infrastructure, the power, connectivity and logistics layer AI actually runs on, and more than half have no growth equity or venture capital exposure, the vehicle most likely to catch early-stage AI winners. Conviction is high. Positioning to benefit from it mostly isn't there yet, which lines up with what we found writing about how family offices use AI to solve their data problems.

Succession is the biggest blind spot

57% of family offices name preserving values, governance and legacy as a top priority. Despite that, 86% have no clear succession plan for their own decision makers, and 51% consider that a real risk to the office's continuity. The stakes are rising: an estimated $124 trillion is set to pass from Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation to their heirs in the U.S. alone by 2048, most of it to Gen X and Millennials.

76% are actively engaging the rising generation, most often by inviting them to meet with professional advisors (39%). Approaches vary widely from there: 28% require outside professional experience before involvement, 25% intentionally shield children from the extent of family wealth, and 24% have no rising-generation strategy at all. 28% cite rising-generation unpreparedness as a top-three risk.

Governance strengthens with scale, especially for business-owning families

83% of family offices have some governance structure in place, most often an investment committee (64%), a formal investment policy statement (35%) or a board of directors (32%). Adoption climbs steadily with each additional generation involved.

Families with a separate operating business face a sharper version of this. 58% currently own one, yet fewer than half (48%) factor that business into how the rest of the portfolio is allocated, a real gap in concentration risk. These families are more likely to have formal governance (48% versus 40%) and nearly twice as likely to name internal conflict as a top-three risk (41% versus 23%). The operating business is often both the family's biggest asset and its biggest source of tension.

Operating costs are climbing too

The average annual operating cost for a $1 billion-plus family office hit $6.6 million this year, driven largely by competition for talent.

What this means for family offices and wealth management

• Portfolios are more sophisticated than the systems tracking them. Allocations span public equities, several categories of private investments, hedge funds and commodities across multiple entities, but many offices still can't see true cross-asset exposure in one place.
• Stated risk and actual positioning don't match. Families rank geopolitics as their top fear and leave traditional hedges like gold almost untouched, which points less to confidence and more to how hard real stress-testing is without the right tools.
• Succession is a permissions problem as much as a legal one. The families making progress aren't just drafting documents, they're giving the next generation an ongoing, defined way to see and participate in the family's finances.
• AI exposure needs to be measurable, not assumed. Prioritizing AI as a theme doesn't help if a family office can't say, asset by asset, how much of the portfolio is actually AI-exposed and how it's performing.
• Governance scales better when it's built in early, rather than retrofitted once a family is managing three generations and an operating business at once.

MYFO is built for this gap. Entity mapping, asset allocation benchmarking, permissioned document and reporting access, and portfolio-level AI exposure reporting sit in one platform, giving family offices the structured foundation this report says most are still missing, instead of stitching the answer together from spreadsheets and one-off reports each time someone asks.

Family offices are managing more complexity than at any point on record. The ones staying ahead are investing in the infrastructure behind their decisions, not just the decisions themselves.

All statistics in this article are sourced directly from J.P. Morgan Private Bank's 2026 Global Family Office Report, based on a survey of 333 single family offices across 30 countries conducted from May through July 2025.

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