23% of wealthy business owners inherited the company. Buying one fell to 11%.

Among wealthy business owners surveyed by Bank of America Private Bank, 23% inherited the company, 11% bought one, and 57% founded it. Inheriting has passed buying, and founding is still the common path. The shares say who owns the place, and they leave open who is allowed to change how it runs.

Escalent, an independent research firm, ran the survey online from January 8 to February 5, 2026. Bank of America Private Bank, the bank's unit for wealthy clients, released it on June 17. The 1,431 people in it were U.S. adults 21 or older with at least $3 million to invest aside from a primary home, and they are not necessarily the bank's clients.

About a third of them are current or retired business owners. That 23% is how those owners came by the company. Answers were weighted by age, wealth, region, and gender so the mix would match wealthy U.S. households, and the margin of error is plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.

Nine in ten of these owners said the business is at least somewhat important to their personal wealth, and just over half said it is very important. For many of them, the company is a large part of what they have.

The bank has asked the question before. The share who inherited rose from 5% in its 2022 survey to 11% in 2024, and to 23% in this one. The share who had bought the company fell from 28% to 22%, and then to 11%.

Owners ages 21 to 45, the study's Generation Z and Millennial group, were more likely to have inherited. Owners 62 and older, grouped as boomers and the Silent Generation, were more likely to have founded what they run.

By the time the shares change hands, the people on the payroll already know who set the prices, who works the weekend, and how a regular is greeted. An heir can hold the paperwork and still be the newest person in that room.

Family is more present than it was in the bank's 2024 survey. Three-quarters of the owners reported some family involvement, up from about half. The share who said nobody in the family is involved fell from 49% to 24%.

Owners reporting a family member in a decision-making or influencer role rose from 7% in 2024 to 27%. More relatives are in the building. The person allowed to change the company is still a minority.

78% said succession planning matters to their wealth strategy. 64% have some kind of plan, and the study describes those plans as informal more often than fully written. 20% have one that is fully documented.

Succession planning did not make the list of problems they named. They talked about taxes, growing the operation, hiring, handing work to other people, and cash.

One owner in the study, from Generation X, with a company bringing in $20 million to $50 million a year, said, "I know business succession planning is important but it's difficult to finalize."

Half of these owners plan to exit within 10 years. 34% intend to sell or transfer the company to another family member, and among owners who inherited, that rises to 61%.

A separate question asked who expects to stay for good. About a quarter said they will never leave, and 35% of those who inherited said the same. An owner can mean to keep the job and still expect the shares to stay in the family.

The papers around the owner are often thin, too. In the full survey, 46% have the three documents the bank treats as basic: a will, a living will or advance directive, and a durable power of attorney, which names someone to handle the money if the owner cannot. Among business owners, 26% have that set.

For people running a family business, the talk with the family was among the hardest parts of that planning, at 25%. They also named the legal documents, the tax bill, and knowing when to start.

The study does not report what an heir is paid. The International Finance Corporation, the World Bank Group's arm for private companies, separates the wage from the shares in its family-business handbook. The wage follows the job, at a level comparable to a non-family employee in that role, and the shares pay the owner for owning.

A new title and a new paycheck are visible to everyone who already works there, especially when no one has written down the reason.

Leaders of family businesses still say the name carries trust. In PwC's 2025 Global Family Business Survey, 74% said a family business is trusted more than a company with no family behind it. PwC interviewed 1,325 family businesses across 62 territories from April 1 to May 31, with the John L. Ward Center for Family Enterprises at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.

PwC cites the Edelman Trust Barometer, from the communications firm Edelman, for the size of that advantage. It shrank from 16 points in 2015 to 8 points in 2025.

A reputation the previous owner spent years building has to be earned again by the person holding the shares. Only 30% of those family businesses keep a family constitution, a written agreement for how the family and the company decide.

Wells Fargo's wealth arm asked a related question in a smaller survey released October 20. 19% of the owners expected to hand the company to their children, and 67% of the children of owners expected it to come to them or a sibling. Those were 65 owners and 181 children, enough to show two different pictures of the future, and too small a group to treat as the odds for any one company.

The shares still leave the practical questions open: who may change pay, who may change how the place runs, and who is paid for the job. For a family shop, Succession and Exit Planning for Immigrant-Owned Family Shops goes through what the business is worth, how a sibling buys the others out, and what happens to the lease. Sibling Dynamics When Parents Have Resources follows who manages what the parents built, and When Adult Children Co-Sign or Guarantee a Family Business Loan covers a child asked to personally guarantee the loan.

The name can come with the company. In the survey Bank of America released in June, a written plan for who has the authority to change it was still uncommon.