Four large surveys asked North American family offices what share of their portfolios sits outside public stocks and bonds. The answers came back at 54%, 42%, 42% and 29%. All four were credible, recent and professionally fielded. They disagree because they asked different families different questions.
The four numbers, and why they are not the same number
UBS put North American family offices at 54% in alternatives and 46% in traditional assets in its Global Family Office Report 2025, surveying 317 single family offices with an average family net worth of $2.7bn between January and April 2025. Inside that 54% sat private equity at 27%, real estate at 18%, hedge funds at 3%, private debt at 3% and infrastructure at 1%.
BlackRock’s 2025 Global Family Office Survey, covering 175 single family offices with more than $320bn in combined assets and fielded between March and May 2025, found 42% in alternatives, up from 39% in 2022 and 2023.
Goldman Sachs also landed on 42%, from 245 family offices surveyed in May and June 2025. Its direction of travel ran the other way: down from 44% in 2023.
Then RBC and Campden Wealth, surveying 141 North American family offices holding $285bn in collective wealth between April and August 2025, reported 29% of the average portfolio in private markets, down from 30% a year earlier, with 88% of respondents invested in private markets at all.
A 25-point spread on what looks like one question is not a scandal. It is a definitional problem. UBS counts real estate and hedge funds inside alternatives, which alone accounts for most of the gap with Campden, whose 29% figure describes private markets rather than alternatives in the wider sense. Goldman and BlackRock draw their lines somewhere between the two. Sample composition does the rest: an average family net worth of $2.7bn buys access to a different opportunity set than the median respondent in a 141-office panel.
What each survey actually measured
| Survey | Fieldwork | Sample | What was measured | Headline figure |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| UBS Global Family Office Report 2025 | Jan to Apr 2025 | 317 single family offices, average family net worth $2.7bn | Alternatives share, North America | 54% |
| BlackRock Global Family Office Survey 2025 | Mar to May 2025 | 175 single family offices, $320bn+ combined assets | Alternatives share | 42%, up from 39% in 2022-23 |
| Goldman Sachs Family Office Investment Insights 2025 | May to Jun 2025 | 245 family offices | Alternatives share | 42%, down from 44% in 2023 |
| RBC / Campden Wealth North America 2025 | Apr to Aug 2025 | 141 North American family offices, $285bn collective wealth | Private markets share | 29%, down from 30% in 2024 |
Read the table as four instruments pointed at overlapping populations rather than four attempts at one truth. The useful signal is not the level. It is that two of the four series are rising and two are falling.
The private equity retreat inside the private markets story
Goldman’s data contains the sharpest single finding in the set. Private equity fell from 26% of family office portfolios in 2023 to 21% in 2025, a five-point drop in the asset class that has carried the entire alternatives thesis for two decades. Distributions slowed, exits stayed scarce, and the marks stopped moving in the direction the models assumed.
The same Goldman survey found 39% of family offices planning to increase private equity allocations over the following twelve months, which is a survey of intentions rather than of behaviour, and intentions have been the less reliable of the two.
There is a mechanical reason a falling percentage can overstate a retreat. When public equity markets run and private marks stay flat, the private share of a portfolio drops without anyone selling anything or deciding anything. Some part of Goldman’s five-point decline is arithmetic of that kind. But denominators do not explain why BlackRock’s series rose over a longer baseline while Goldman’s fell over a shorter one, and no survey in the set publishes enough underlying detail to settle the question from outside.
Elsewhere the money went sideways rather than out. Goldman recorded 72% of family offices invested in secondaries, up from 60%, and cryptocurrency ownership at 33% in 2025 against 26% in 2023. UBS found 37% of respondents allocating to infrastructure in its 2026 report, fielded between January and March 2026 across 307 family offices holding $627.4bn in total wealth, which also recorded 60% planning to change their strategic asset allocation over the next twelve months, the highest level UBS has logged.
Sixty per cent of a sophisticated cohort rewriting its allocation policy in a single year is not a picture of settled conviction.
Direct investment is where the actual behaviour shows
Allocation percentages are a lagging and heavily smoothed indicator. Deal activity is not.
Citi Wealth’s 2025 Global Family Office Report, drawing on 346 respondents across 45 countries surveyed in June and July 2025, found 70% of family offices making direct investments, and four in ten of those had increased direct-investment activity. BNY Wealth’s 2025 Global Family Office Study, covering 282 offices, found 64% of decision-makers planning six or more direct investments in the year ahead.
That is the movement the allocation surveys keep partially missing. Families are not necessarily raising the alternatives line on the pie chart. They are changing how they access it, buying into companies and assets themselves rather than through a fund that charges to do it for them, which shows up in the percentage tables slowly and in staffing plans immediately.
Direct investing also changes what a family office is. Sourcing and diligencing deals in-house requires people who cost what people at funds cost, which is why the staffing question now arrives attached to the allocation question rather than after it.
The population is growing underneath all of it. Deloitte Private’s Family Office Insights Series 2024 counted 8,030 single family offices worldwide, up 31% from 6,130 in 2019, with 3,180 of them in North America and combined assets under management of $3.1trn, projected to reach $5.4trn by 2030.
What the surveys do not capture
Home bias, for one. UBS found US family offices holding 86% of portfolios in North America in 2025, the strongest concentration of any region surveyed. A portfolio can be 54% alternative and still be a bet on one continent, and the diversification that the alternatives line is supposed to represent may be thinner than the label suggests.
Liquidity is the other thing the tables flatten. A 42% alternatives allocation held mostly in secondaries and private credit behaves nothing like a 42% allocation held in ten-year buyout funds drawn down in 2021, but both appear as the same number in the same row.
Nor do the surveys capture how these decisions get made, which is rarely at a desk. Tommy Shields, Head of Investor Relations at Onyx Reserve, argues that the reallocation happens in conversation long before it ever appears in a survey.
“Most of the useful information moves in rooms where nobody is selling anything. A principal who has just had a disappointing five years in one asset class will say so over dinner in a way that never reaches a questionnaire, and the person listening changes their thinking that night rather than at the next committee meeting.”
What remains unresolved is which of the two directions in the table is measuring the cycle and which is measuring a change of mind. Goldman’s four-point decline and Campden’s one-point decline are both small enough to be noise and both point the same way, against BlackRock’s three-point rise over a longer baseline. Another year of fieldwork will separate them. Until then, the honest reading of the four surveys is that family offices have not agreed with each other about what they own, and have not agreed with themselves about what they want to own next.