The 2026 family-office allocation shift, in real numbers

For the first time on the UBS series, the share of family offices that plan to change their strategic asset allocation in the next 12 months has reached sixty percent, up from thirty-five in 2025 and twenty-seven in 2024 (UBS, Global Family Office Report 2026, fieldwork 22 January to 30 March 2026, n=307, average AUM USD 1.3bn). The headline is a willingness to move. The question worth a brief is where the move is going, and what the move costs in governance, liquidity, and underwriting.

The composition on the planning side is more useful than the willingness to act. Equities are planned to rise from 30% to 33%. Fixed income falls from 19% to 17%. Private equity falls from 21% to 17%. Real estate falls from 11% to 8%. Cash holds at 8%. Hedge funds rise from 4% to 6%. Private debt falls from 4% to 3%. Gold and precious metals rise from 2% to 3%. And the "other" bucket, which UBS breaks out as infrastructure, art, and commodities, rises from 1% to 5% (UBS 2026; Caproasia summary of 11 June 2026). The planned shift is concentrated: more equities, more hedges, less real estate, less direct private equity, and a meaningful reweight into the "other" sleeve that the desk reads as a quiet move into infrastructure and gold.

This is educational market commentary, not personalised investment advice. The figures cited here are the survey averages, weighted by reported family office AUM, and are a baseline against which the office tests its own weight.

The family-office shift is a smaller version of a larger move on the sovereign side. The Invesco 14th Global Sovereign Asset Management Study 2026 surveyed 144 funds (90 sovereign wealth funds and 54 central banks) with USD 29tn of sampled assets as of March 2026 (Invesco, Global Sovereign Asset Management Study 2026, press release 29 June 2026). The five-year composition for SWFs shows listed equities falling from 36% in 2022 to 30% in 2026, fixed income steady at 29%, illiquid alternatives rising from 19% to 24%, and direct strategic investments edging from 9% to 10%.

Inside that reweight, infrastructure is the fastest-growing alternative asset class on the sample. The share rose from 4.9% in 2022 to 6.4% in 2023, 7.5% in 2024, 8.1% in 2025, and 9.0% in 2026 (Invesco 2026). For a multi-currency family-office book, the sovereign reweight is the macro backdrop: a 4.1 percentage-point move in five years on a USD 29tn sample is the kind of flow that re-prices entry points in core and core-plus infrastructure funds through the next two vintages.

Private credit appears as a separate asset class in the 2026 Invesco survey for the first time, reflecting how embedded it has become across the sample. The report identifies infrastructure and private credit as the clearest net allocation beneficiaries, with one North American liability sovereign quoted as planning to roughly double its private credit book over the next five years, and a Middle Eastern development sovereign saying the AI wave is captured in private credit and infrastructure opportunities (Invesco 2026; companion press release 29 June 2026).

The private-credit and infrastructure flow is also visible in the consultant channel. Dakota reports that investment consultants including Aksia, Meketa, State Street, NEPC, Callan, Albourne, RVK, AON, Hamilton Lane, and Franklin Park guided roughly USD 27.7bn into private credit commitments in the second quarter of 2026, with activity spanning direct lending, special situations, distressed debt, opportunistic credit, CLOs, and mezzanine (Dakota, Q2 2026). On infrastructure, closed-ended funds are seeking an aggregate USD 474bn globally as of the GIIA 2026 outlook, with USD 143bn attributable to the top 10 managers. LP allocations to infrastructure debt sat at 9% of total allocation data in 2025, and infrastructure secondaries posted a record USD 30bn in combined GP and LP-led volume in 2025 (GIIA, Infrastructure Outlook 2026).

The Coller Capital Global Private Capital Barometer 44th edition (Summer 2026) shows a modest cooling in primary enthusiasm. The share of LPs planning to increase target allocations to private credit over the next 12 months fell from 42% in the Winter 2025-26 Barometer to 29% in the Summer 2026 edition, and infrastructure from 39% to 31%. Eighty-eight percent of LPs still expect to maintain or increase private credit targets, and 57% expect no change to overall target allocations, so the cooling is a discipline pass, not a turn (Coller Capital, Summer 2026). For a family-office book, the disciplined institutional pace is the right reference for how quickly a new sleeve can be sized without forcing price.

Three lines cover most of the work for the office. The first is the equity reweight. Thirty percent to thirty-three percent is small in weight and large in absolute dollars on a USD 1.3bn AUM book. The line is being re-tested against a quarter in which the Fed has kept policy on hold through a Middle East energy shock and the dollar has held in a 119 to 121 broad index band (FRED, Nominal Broad US Dollar Index, monthly, January to July 2026). The desk sizes the equity line against the corridor already in the policy, and does not add to it on the survey signal alone.

The second is the gold and infrastructure pair. The UBS 2026 plan moves gold from 2% to 3% and "other" from 1% to 5%. Read together with the Invesco SWF infrastructure series, the desk reads the move as a hedge plus a long-duration real-asset sleeve, not as a discretionary return bet. The two lines should be written into the policy as separate sleeves, with separate liquidity assumptions and a written rebalance band between them.

The third is the real-estate drawdown. Eleven percent to eight percent is the largest planned reduction in the survey. The reason cited across the report is a combination of higher real rates, lower transaction volume, and a reweight into higher-yielding or more thematic alternatives (UBS 2026). For a household with direct real estate, the work is to mark the book to the corridor the policy already names, and to write the divestment cadence against the funding plan rather than against a market view.

A survey is a snapshot of intent, weighted by the AUM of those who answered. It is not a forecast and it is not a recommendation. The Invesco 2026 study is explicit that 65% of SWFs identify private markets as a key return driver and that net allocation intentions show infrastructure and private credit as the clearest beneficiaries, but the same report warns of crowding concerns in private credit and concentration risk in listed equities (Invesco 2026). The UBS 2026 report finds the highest share of family offices on record willing to change allocation, and a separate risk chart in which 64% name a major geopolitical conflict as the primary twelve-month risk, 49% a global trade war, and 36% higher inflation (UBS 2026).

The disciplined reading is to take the survey as a baseline and ask three questions. Which of the planned weights sits inside the corridor the policy already names. Which of the planned weights sits outside, and what would have to be true to re-sign the corridor. And which of the planned weights would force a new line of governance, such as a new direct-investment committee, a new manager-review cadence, or a new unfunded commitment schedule. The survey answers none of these for the office. The office answers them on the next Tuesday.