The figure that gets quoted is US$124 trillion. That is the projection Cerulli Associates, a Boston research firm, published in December 2024 for the wealth that will change hands in the United States through 2048. Of that, Cerulli expects about $105 trillion to go to heirs and $18 trillion to charity. Nearly $100 trillion, or 81 per cent, will come from Baby Boomers and older generations.
It is a big number, and it has become a staple of conference slides. It is worth reading more slowly than it is usually read, because the details say more about what families will actually face than the total does.
The spouse comes first
The detail most often skipped is this one. Cerulli projects that $54 trillion will pass “horizontally,” to spouses, before it eventually moves on to heirs and charities. Nearly $40 trillion of those spousal transfers, it estimates, will go to widowed women in the Baby Boomer and older generations.
In other words, a large part of the great wealth transfer is not, in the first instance, a transfer between generations. It is a transfer within a marriage, often at a moment of grief, frequently to the partner who may not have been the one managing the money. Cerulli’s own framing is commercial: it describes “a massive need, and opportunity” for wealth and asset managers. Read from the family’s side, it describes a large number of people inheriting responsibility for complicated estates, often for the first time and later in life.
The generational part comes later, and it is uneven in timing. Millennials are projected to inherit the most over the next 25 years, about $46 trillion. But over the next ten, Generation X stands to inherit more, about $14 trillion against Millennials’ $8 trillion.
And it is concentrated. Cerulli expects more than half of the total, $62 trillion, to come from households that are already high-net-worth or ultra-high-net-worth, a group that makes up only about 2 per cent of US households.
The numbers disagree
Here is a useful caution. UBS, in its Global Wealth Report 2025, published its own estimate: more than $83 trillion expected to be transferred worldwide over the next 20 to 25 years, $9 trillion of it between spouses and $74 trillion between generations. It put the United States at “over USD 29 trillion,” the largest of any country, ahead of Brazil and mainland China.
Set side by side, those figures look irreconcilable. One firm projects $124 trillion moving in the US alone by 2048; the other projects $83 trillion for the whole world, about $29 trillion of it in America, over a similar span. The reason is not that one is right and the other wrong. They measure different things in different ways: different time windows, different assumptions about growth, spending and longevity, different treatment of spousal transfers, and different definitions of the wealth being counted. Neither report sets out its full method in its public summary, so the gap cannot be closed from the outside.
The lesson is a modest one. “The great wealth transfer” is not a measured quantity like a census count. It is a family of projections, each built on its own model, and the total depends heavily on who is doing the modelling. The direction is not in doubt; both firms expect very large sums to move. The precise size is.
That matters because the headline figure is often used to sell urgency. A projection that varies by a factor of several, depending on the source, is better treated as a sense of scale than as a fact to plan around.
What the forecasts do not count
There is a part of the handover that no forecast tries to value: the accounts, keys and files that exist only digitally and do not pass automatically to anyone.
This is not only a matter of photographs. A family’s working records increasingly live in cloud storage and email. Investment, banking and property portals are reached through passwords, authenticator apps and passkeys. Some assets, such as cryptocurrency held in a private wallet, may be unrecoverable if no one has the key. As WIRED noted in August 2026, crypto kept in a private wallet with no surviving key “is lost forever.”
The large technology companies have built tools for this, and their own documentation shows both what they do and where they stop.
Apple’s Legacy Contact feature lets an account holder name one or more people who can request access to certain data after their death. To do so, the contact needs an access key generated in advance and a death certificate. Apple’s support page is explicit about the limits. A legacy contact cannot see purchased films, music, books or subscriptions, or anything stored in iCloud Keychain, which includes “payment information, passwords, and passkeys.” And where there is more than one legacy contact, any one of them “can individually make decisions about your account data after your death, including permanently deleting it.”
Google’s Inactive Account Manager works differently. A user chooses up to ten people to be notified, or to receive selected data, once the account has been inactive for a period the user sets. Google’s help page also states that, without such a plan, it “reserves the right to delete an inactive Google Account and its activity and data” after at least two years of inactivity.
Both tools are useful. Neither is an estate plan. And neither will help if no one knows that it was set up, or which accounts existed in the first place.
The law, so far
In the United States, access to a person’s digital accounts after death is mainly a matter of state law. The Uniform Law Commission drafted a model law, the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, known as RUFADAA. According to the commission’s chief counsel, speaking to WIRED in August 2026, it has been enacted in 48 states, Washington DC and the US Virgin Islands.
The law attempts a balance. Under it, as WIRED explains, a fiduciary may be able to close accounts, but generally gets the contents, such as the text of emails and private messages, only if the person who died expressly granted that authority. Otherwise, a fiduciary may be limited to a catalogue of metadata, such as who wrote to whom and when.
There is a further subtlety. One specialist quoted by WIRED noted that a platform’s own online controls take priority, and so could override what someone writes elsewhere. In practice, that means the tick boxes inside an app may count for more than the paragraph in a will.
None of this is settled ground. Mike Kiser, a co-chair of the OpenID Foundation’s Death in the Digital Estate Community Group, which is working on the problem, told WIRED that “there is no defined way to tell a provider that someone has died or lost capacity.”
Families, not figures
Strip away the trillions and the forecasts point to something quite human. A large share of the transfer will land first with surviving spouses. Much of it will flow from a small number of wealthy households. Its timing will fall unevenly across generations. And part of what is handed over will be locked behind credentials that only one person ever held.
Cerulli reports that 89 per cent of the wealth management firms it surveyed in 2024 named family meetings and regular communication among family members as a key best practice. That is a professional consensus, not a guarantee, and The Risk Edit does not offer planning advice. But it is a telling one. The industry that models these transfers in trillions has concluded that what most affects how they go is whether a family has talked about them.
The money is counted in forecasts. The handover happens at a kitchen table.
