Prince William Net Worth 2026: The $1.6B Royal Fortune

Prince William‘s net worth is estimated at $140 million to $1.6 billion as of November 2026. The wide range is the story itself: his personal wealth sits near the bottom of it, while the top of it counts the Duchy of Cornwall estate he controls as Prince of Wales. Fresh accounts published in June 2026 put the Duchy at about £1.2 billion, made William wealthier than his father for the first time, and showed he took home £21.6 million of private income in a single year.

Early Life and Background

Prince William Arthur Philip Louis was born on 21 June 1982 at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, London, the first child of Charles, then Prince of Wales, and Diana, Princess of Wales. He arrived seven days after his parents returned from a tour, and within hours his name was announced to a crowd outside the hospital — a measure of how closely his life has been watched from the first day of it. He was second in line to the throne at birth, behind his father, and he has spent the 44 years since preparing for a job he did not choose and cannot resign from.

His childhood split in two in 1992, when his parents separated, and again in 1996, when their divorce was finalised. The defining event came on 31 August 1997, when Diana died in a car crash in Paris. William was 15. The image of him walking behind his mother’s coffin at her funeral, flanked by his father, his grandfather and his 12-year-old brother Harry, remains one of the most reproduced photographs in modern British history. The loss shaped the two causes he has stayed closest to as an adult: mental health, and the protection of children.

Money was never a question in William’s childhood, but it was never his either. The royal family’s wealth is layered — Crown Estate property that belongs to the state, the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall that fund the monarch and the heir, and private money passed down inside the family. William grew up inside the first two layers and inherited the third in stages: a trust from his mother that matured when he turned 30, a share of his great-grandmother’s estate, and, in September 2022, the Duchy of Cornwall itself. Understanding his fortune means keeping those layers apart, because the outlets that call him a billionaire and the ones that put him near $140 million are both right — they are counting different layers.

He spent his early years between Kensington Palace in London and Highgrove House, his father’s country home in Gloucestershire. Summers were often at Balmoral in Scotland, the late Queen’s estate, where the family lived a deliberately unglamorous outdoor life of barbecues, fishing and long walks. His grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, was a steady presence; she took a close interest in his schooling and, in later years, in preparing him for the throne. His grandfather, Prince Philip, pushed him toward the military, and toward the idea that a future king should have done a real job before taking on ceremonial ones.

The relationship with his younger brother Harry, once famously close, has become the most public fracture in the family. The brothers served together, shared a household office, and founded the Royal Foundation together. Harry’s departure from royal duties in 2020, his memoir Spare in 2023, and a string of interviews have left the two barely speaking, according to extensive reporting by the BBC and others. The split matters to William’s money story in one concrete way: the Duchy of Cornwall funds only the heir’s household, so Harry’s exit concentrated the estate’s income on William’s family alone.

Education

William’s schooling followed the royal template, with one break from it. He started at Wetherby School in London, then went to Ludgrove School in Berkshire, a preparatory boarding school. In 1995 he entered Eton College, his father’s old school and the choice his mother had favoured, paying fees that ran to roughly £17,000 a year at the time. He studied geography, biology and history of art at A-level, and played football, water polo and swimming for the school.

After Eton he took a gap year, and he used it in a way that set a pattern for his public life. He spent time in Belize with the Welsh Guards on a military exercise, worked on a dairy farm in the West Country, and travelled to southern Chile with the youth charity Raleigh International, where he helped build a school and worked on community projects. The Chile trip produced the photographs of a prince in a hard hat and work boots that Kensington Palace has returned to ever since — the heir as a working man rather than a ceremonial one.

In 2001 he enrolled at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, reading geography. The choice was his own: St Andrews was small, far from London, and offered him something close to anonymity. It was there, in the first weeks of his first year, that he met Catherine Middleton, a fellow student from Berkshire, at a fashion show where she was modelling. They were friends first, flatmates second, and a couple by their third year. William graduated in 2005 with a Master of Arts degree, a 2:1 in geography — the highest degree classification achieved by any heir to the throne.

His education did not stop at graduation. In 2006 he entered the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and in 2008 he began flying training with the Royal Air Force. In 2010 he completed a course in agriculture at Cambridge, a short programme designed to prepare him for running the Duchy of Cornwall’s farming estate. The Cambridge stint is easy to miss in his biography and hard to overstate in his money story: the Duchy is, at its core, a farming and land business, and William arrived at it with a degree in geography and a grounding in estate management rather than none at all.

Career Journey

William’s working life has run in three phases, and each one changed what he earned. The first was the military. He was commissioned into the Blues and Royals regiment of the Household Cavalry in December 2006, served in the Army, then transferred to the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy to train across all three services. In 2010 he qualified as a search-and-rescue pilot and joined No. 22 Squadron at RAF Valley in Anglesey, Wales, flying Sea King helicopters.

The rescue work was real. Over three years with the squadron he flew more than 150 missions and logged over 1,300 flying hours, according to the Royal Family’s own account. The missions included airlifting injured walkers off Snowdonia, responding to shipwrecks in the Irish Sea, and recovering casualties in weather that grounded civilian aircraft. He left the RAF in September 2013, shortly after the birth of his first child, and the squadron’s commanding officer said at the time that William had been treated exactly like any other pilot — rostered, assessed and, when necessary, criticised like one.

The second phase was civilian flying. In 2014 Kensington Palace announced that William would join the East Anglian Air Ambulance as a co-pilot, employed by Bond Air Services, the contractor that operated the charity’s helicopters. He was the first member of the royal family in the direct line of succession to sign a contract with a civilian employer. He flew from Cambridge Airport from July 2015 until his final shift in July 2017, working shifts of about nine and a half hours and earning roughly £40,000 a year — every penny of which he donated to charity. Donations to the air ambulance trebled during his two years with the service, from £55,101 in 2015 to £163,082 in 2016, according to the charity’s own accounts as reported by The Crown Chronicles.

The third phase began in the summer of 2017, when he stepped down from flying to become a full-time working royal. The trigger was age as much as duty: the Queen was 91, the Duke of Edinburgh was retiring from public engagements, and the workload had to pass to the next generation. Since then William has carried one of the heaviest engagement schedules in the family, combining ceremonial duties — state visits, investitures, Trooping the Colour — with the two projects he built himself: the Earthshot Prize and Homewards, his five-year programme to end homelessness. In September 2022, on his grandmother’s death, he also became Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall, and the estate that had funded his father’s household for 70 years began funding his.

Rise to Fame

William never had to rise to fame — he was born into the brightest spotlight in Britain — but he did have to learn to live in it, and the learning curve was public. As a teenager he was pursued by photographers with an intensity that, after his mother’s death, the Palace and the press agreed to temper. A deal struck in the late 1990s kept the press away from Eton in exchange for occasional official photographs, and for a few years it mostly held.

St Andrews tested the arrangement. The press agreed to leave him alone while he studied, and in return the university and the Palace released periodic updates. The truce broke in 2004, when photographs of William and Kate on a skiing holiday were published, and the couple’s relationship became permanent front-page material. William’s response — a 2007 statement asking the press to respect Kate’s privacy — was the first time he had spoken publicly as an adult about the cost of the attention, and it set the tone for a lifelong wariness of the media that his brother would later take much further.

His public standing changed decisively in April 2011, when he married Catherine Middleton at Westminster Abbey in a ceremony watched by an estimated two billion people worldwide. The wedding turned the couple into the monarchy’s most valuable asset: young, photogenic, apparently stable, and a direct answer to the question of whether the institution had a future. Their three children — George in 2013, Charlotte in 2015, Louis in 2018 — each became a news event of their own, and each birth was announced from the steps of St Mary’s Hospital, the same hospital where William himself was born.

The moment that recast his wealth, though, was not a wedding or a birth. It was 8 September 2022, when Queen Elizabeth II died at Balmoral and Charles became king. Overnight, William inherited the Duchy of Cornwall and the title Prince of Wales, and with them an estate worth about £1 billion. The June 2026 publication of the Duchy’s annual accounts turned that inheritance into a headline: for the first time, the heir was richer than the monarch. The Mirror’s reporting of the accounts, picked up by UNILAD and The List, put William’s Duchy-linked wealth at £1.2 billion — roughly $1.6 billion — against his father’s £640 million on the Sunday Times Rich List. William had become, in the words of The List, the first royal billionaire.

Main Sources of Income

William’s money comes from three streams, and they could hardly be more different. The first, and by far the largest, is the Duchy of Cornwall. The second is inherited private wealth. The third, now closed, was a salary — first from the armed forces, then from the air ambulance — which he gave away. There is no fourth stream: William has no book deal, no television contract, no product line, and no paid speaking circuit. The contrast with his brother, who signed multi-million-pound deals with Netflix and Spotify after leaving royal duties, is the point. William’s income is an estate’s income, and it arrives whether he works or not.

The Duchy of Cornwall is the engine. It was created in 1337 by King Edward III to give the heir to the throne an income independent of the Crown, and it has done that job for nearly 700 years. The estate covers roughly 128,000 to 135,000 acres across 21 to 23 counties in England and Wales — the count varies by source because the Duchy keeps acquiring and selling land — and it holds farmland, houses, commercial property, coastline, woodland and mineral rights. Its best-known holdings include the Oval cricket ground in London, around 67,000 acres of Dartmoor, the Nansledan urban extension in Newquay, where 4,000 homes are planned by 2045, and the Isles of Scilly, where the Duchy owns most of the freehold. It is the largest private landholding in Britain, and it is why William is the country’s biggest private landowner.

The Duchy’s net assets stood at about £1.2 billion in the accounts published in June 2026. That figure is the source of the billionaire headlines, and it needs a caveat that most of those headlines skip: William cannot sell the estate, spend its capital, or leave it to anyone he chooses. The Duchy passes automatically to the next heir when William becomes king, and the proceeds of any land sale must stay inside the estate and be reinvested. What he does receive is the annual surplus — the profit after the estate’s running costs — and that is a very different kind of wealth from a billion pounds in the bank.

The surplus has run at roughly £21 million to £24 million a year since he took over. The Duchy’s own integrated annual reports, as reported by Celebrity Net Worth and Entertainment Now, show William received about $30.4 million (£23.6 million) in the 2023–24 financial year and about $30.9 million (£22.9 million) in 2024–25. The June 2026 accounts showed £21.6 million ($28.5 million) for 2025–26. The money funds the official, charitable and private costs of the Prince and Princess of Wales, their household staff, their offices and their three children — it is a household budget as much as an income.

The second stream is inheritance. William and Harry each received a share of their mother Diana’s estate, which was worth about £21 million, held in trust until they turned 30. William’s share has been reported at around £10 million, which he received in 2012, plus jewellery and personal items. He also received a reported share of the Queen Mother’s estate, estimated at around £6 million by some outlets. These are the only funds William owns outright and could spend freely, and they are the reason the personal-wealth estimates — $120 million from LoveMoney, $140 million from Celebrity Net Worth — cluster where they do: inheritance, grown by investment over 14 years, plus the value of private property and possessions.

The third stream is the Sovereign Grant, and it is important to be precise about it: the grant is not William’s income. It is public money paid by the Treasury to fund the official duties of the Royal Household — staff, travel, building maintenance — and it is not paid to any individual royal. The grant was £86.3 million for the Royal Family in the 2024–25 financial year, about £1.29 per person in the UK, according to reporting by BritBrief. William’s official engagements are funded through it, but the money never becomes his.

Salary and Earnings

William has not drawn a salary since 2017, and the two salaries he did draw were modest by any standard. As a Flight Lieutenant in the RAF he earned a service salary in the region of £45,000 to £50,000 a year, according to BritBrief’s survey of the reporting. As an East Anglian Air Ambulance co-pilot he earned about £40,000 a year, and he donated the entire amount — after tax, roughly £30,000 a year according to Energy Voice’s reporting at the time — to the air ambulance charity. Kensington Palace confirmed the donation arrangement when he took the job, and the charity’s accounts show the practical effect: donations trebled while he was on the roster.

Since 2017 his earnings have been the Duchy surplus, and the year-by-year record is unusually transparent for a private fortune, because the Duchy publishes accounts. The figures below are the surplus paid to the Prince of Wales in each financial year since he inherited the estate:

The gentle decline from £23.6 million to £21.6 million is not a sign of trouble. The Duchy’s surplus moves with farm rents, commercial property income and the timing of development receipts, and the estate has been spending heavily on its Nansledan housing project and on the shift to net zero. The June 2026 accounts also disclosed the tax William paid on that income: £7.76 million in income and capital gains tax for 2024–25, after £8.34 million the year before, and more than £20 million in total since he became Prince of Wales, according to the Royal Household disclosure reported by the Mirror and Newsy People. Some outlets put the four-year total higher, at more than £26 million, because they count differently — the £20 million figure is the one the Palace’s own disclosure supports, so it is the one we use.

Two points about that tax bill are worth making, because they are the two things William’s critics and his defenders argue about. The first is that he pays it voluntarily. The Duchy is classed as a private estate, so it pays no corporation tax and no capital gains tax on its property sales, and William is not legally obliged to pay income tax on the surplus. He does so at the top rate, and Kensington Palace says so publicly. The second is that his personal tax bill — up to £7 million a year, according to the Sunday Times — puts him in the top 0.002 per cent of UK taxpayers. Both facts are true at once, and the argument about whether the arrangement is fair is a political one, not a factual one.

His earnings also include one stream that never appears in a salary table: the value of the homes, staff, travel and security that come with the job. The Metropolitan Police does not publish the cost of royal protection, and the Palace does not put a figure on it, so it cannot be counted in a net worth estimate. It is real value all the same — a private individual with William’s profile would spend millions a year on security alone — and honest estimates say so rather than pretending the gap does not exist.

Businesses and Investments

William owns no company, holds no directorship, and has never launched a business. What he runs instead is the Duchy of Cornwall, and it operates like a business of serious scale: a portfolio of farms, houses, shops, offices and development land, managed by a professional team under a chief executive, Will Bax, and a board that includes the Prince himself. The Duchy’s own reporting describes its work in four parts — farming and rural estates, commercial property, residential development, and investment — and William has spent his first four years as Duke pushing the balance of those parts toward housing and the environment.

The most consequential decision of his tenure came in May 2026, when the Duchy announced it would sell about a fifth of its estate over the next decade — roughly 20 per cent of its land — and reinvest the proceeds, estimated at around $670 million, in affordable housing, nature recovery and renewable energy. The plan, reported by The Times and Reality Tea, refocuses the estate around five “heartlands” and shifts it from a traditional landholder into what its chief executive called a vehicle for wider social impact. The estate director, Ben Murphy, said in 2024 that William had asked the team to address housing and environmental issues in Cornwall and the other counties where the estate sits.

The first sale under the plan showed how hard the shift will be. In October 2026 the Duchy put the 3,000-acre Bradninch Estate in Devon up for sale, and residents reacted with anger, telling reporters to “go to hell” and warning that their homes and farms were at risk. In November 2026 the Duchy’s rural director, Matthew Morris, met residents and apologised for the way the sale had been handled. The episode is a reminder that the Duchy’s tenants — farmers, shopkeepers and families who have lived on estate land for generations — are stakeholders in a business decision, not bystanders to it, and that William’s plan to remake the estate will be judged by them first.

Other Duchy projects show the direction of travel. Nansledan, the urban extension at Newquay in Cornwall, will deliver 4,000 homes by 2045, with a share of them built as social housing in partnership with the housing association. The Duchy has committed to making the whole estate net zero by 2032, and in the past year alone it channelled more than $20 million into community projects and $5.6 million into environmental goals, according to YourLifeChoices’ reading of the Duchy report. William has also directed that the roughly $2 million a year the Duchy used to receive in rent from Dartmoor prison — empty since July 2024 — should go to the local community through the Princetown Community Fund instead.

His personal investments are private and largely invisible. The Diana inheritance was placed in trust and invested, and it is reasonable to assume it sits in a conventional portfolio of funds and gilts managed on his behalf, but no filing or disclosure confirms the mix, so we do not guess at it. He is not known to hold shares in any listed company, and he has no venture portfolio. The contrast with his father is instructive: Charles built the Duchy of Lancaster’s commercial property holdings and the Highgrove food and garden businesses over decades, while William’s business record is, so far, the Duchy itself and the two charities he founded.

Those two charities are the closest thing William has to business ventures, and they are run like them. The Earthshot Prize, launched in 2020, is a ten-year, £50 million programme that awards five £1 million prizes each year to solutions for the climate crisis. It is funded by philanthropists and corporate partners, not by William personally, and it has grown into a global awards ceremony with a televised final — the 2025 edition was held in Brazil, and the 2026 edition took place at SXSW London. Homewards, launched in June 2023, is a five-year programme working in six locations across the UK to show that homelessness can be ended, with housing projects, landlord partnerships and a coalition of local businesses. Neither charity adds to William’s wealth. Both are the reason his wealth is discussed as a tool rather than a trophy.

Brand Deals and Sponsorships

William has no brand deals, no sponsorships and no endorsements, and he never will while he is a working royal. The rules that govern the Royal Family forbid commercial endorsements, and William has never tested them. There is no William-branded product, no paid social media post, no appearance fee, and no memoir. The absence is the point: the monarchy’s business model is that the family sells nothing, and its income comes from land and the state instead.

What he does lend his name to is charity, and the value of that is measurable even if it never reaches his bank account. The Earthshot Prize’s corporate partners — a roster of global companies that fund the £1 million prizes — attach themselves to the prize because William’s name is on it. The Royal Foundation, the charitable vehicle he ran with Kate and Harry until 2019, raised millions a year on the same basis. When William became a Grantor of Royal Warrants in spring 2026, alongside Kate, he gained the power to award the royal warrant — the mark that a company supplies goods or services to the Royal Household — to businesses of his choosing. A warrant is not a payment, but for the small firms that receive one it is worth a fortune in reputation, and the decision of who gets one is now partly William’s.

The one commercial-adjacent story in his life is the one he walked away from. After Harry’s Netflix and book deals, there was sustained speculation that William might monetise his own story, and in October 2026 he was asked what jobs he would want if he were not a royal. His answer — reported by UNILAD — was that he would like to have been a pilot or a farmer, the two working lives he has already lived. It was a telling answer: the two careers he named are the two that paid him a salary, and both of them paid him less than £50,000 a year.

Houses, Cars and Other Assets

William’s homes are not his to sell, but they are his to live in, and the list is long. The family’s main London base is Apartment 1A at Kensington Palace, a 20-room apartment spread over four floors that was renovated for about £4.5 million before the couple moved in after their wedding. It is a grace-and-favour residence — the Palace provides it, and the couple pay no rent — and it is also their office, housing their staff and the headquarters of their charitable work.

Their country home is Anmer Hall, a ten-bedroom Georgian house on the Sandringham estate in Norfolk, given to the couple as a wedding gift by the late Queen. It was renovated at a cost of about £1.5 million before they moved in, and it has been valued at around £5.5 million in past reporting, with some estimates putting its current market value far higher. The family moved there full-time in 2015, when William was flying for the air ambulance, because it put him within reach of Cambridge Airport.

In 2022 the family moved to Adelaide Cottage, a four-bedroom house in Windsor Great Park, to be closer to the children’s school and to the late Queen, who was then living at Windsor Castle. The cottage is small by royal standards — four bedrooms, no live-in staff quarters — and the move was widely read as a deliberate step toward a more ordinary family life. Reporting in 2025 suggested the family were preparing to move again, to the larger Forest Lodge elsewhere in Windsor Great Park, but Kensington Palace has not confirmed a move, so we record it as reported rather than settled.

None of these homes counts toward William’s personal net worth, because he owns none of them. The Crown Estate and the royal palaces belong to the state or to the Crown as an institution, and Anmer Hall sits on the Sandringham estate, which is the monarch’s private property — it belongs to Charles, not to William. What William does own, in the private layer of his wealth, is the investment portfolio built from his inheritance, and its contents are not public.

His cars are modest by billionaire standards, and deliberately so. He has been photographed driving a Land Rover Defender, an Audi RS e-tron GT — an electric car he has used for official engagements, in keeping with his environmental work — and, on occasion, a motorcycle, a Ducati he has owned since his twenties. There is no collection of supercars, no classic-car portfolio, and no private jet: royal travel is by scheduled flights, RAF Voyager aircraft, or helicopter, and it is paid for by the Sovereign Grant or the Duchy, not by William personally. The one vehicle that matters to his story is not a car at all — it is the yellow Sea King helicopter he flew for the RAF, and the air ambulance helicopters that followed it.

Two other assets deserve a mention because they are routinely overvalued in net worth lists. The first is jewellery: William inherited pieces from his mother’s collection, including the sapphire engagement ring he gave to Kate, which had been Diana’s. Its value is sentimental rather than financial, and it is not sold. The second is art and furniture in the royal residences, which belong to the Royal Collection — held in trust for the nation — and not to William. Any estimate that adds the Crown Jewels, worth an estimated £3 billion to £5 billion, to a royal’s personal net worth is wrong on its face: the jewels belong to the Crown, and no member of the family can sell them.

Awards and Achievements

William’s honours are mostly inherited or ceremonial, but the list marks the stages of his public life. He was made a Knight of the Garter — the oldest and most senior order of chivalry in Britain — in 2008, and a Knight of the Thistle, the Scottish equivalent, in 2012. On his wedding day in 2011 he was created Duke of Cambridge, Earl of Strathearn and Baron Carrickfergus; on his father’s accession in 2022 he became Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall, and took his seat as a Counsellor of State.

His military decorations include the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal and the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Medal, and he holds honorary ranks across all three services — including Colonel of the Welsh Guards and, since 2023, Colonel-in-Chief of the Army Air Corps, a role his father held before him and one that drew attention because his brother Harry had wanted it.

The achievements that carry weight outside the honours system are the two programmes he built. The Earthshot Prize has, in five years, become the largest environmental prize in the world by money awarded, with 25 winners funded at £1 million each and a network of finalists that has gone on to raise hundreds of millions in follow-on investment. Homewards, three years into its five-year run, has put housing projects on the ground in all six of its locations and has brought landlords, employers and local councils into a single coalition — a model the government has watched closely. Neither is an award, but both are the kind of record a future king is judged on.

He has also been recognised for the part of his work that is hardest to measure: mental health. The Heads Together campaign, which he launched with Kate and Harry in 2016, is credited with shifting the public conversation about mental health in Britain, and the Royal Foundation’s mental health programmes have reached hundreds of thousands of people. In 2024 he was named the most popular member of the Royal Family in polling by YouGov, ahead of his wife and his father — a position he has held, with brief interruptions, for most of the last decade.

Net Worth Growth Over the Years

William’s fortune has grown in steps, not smoothly, because it has grown by inheritance rather than by income. The table below traces the steps, using the figures reported at the time by the outlets named.

The step that matters is 2022. Before it, William was a wealthy man with a salary and an inheritance. After it, he controls one of the largest private estates in Europe. The step is also the reason his wealth will jump again: when he becomes king, the Duchy of Cornwall passes to Prince George, and William inherits the Duchy of Lancaster — his father’s estate, worth about £653 million and generating about £27.4 million a year — along with the private Sandringham and Balmoral estates. The monarchy’s wealth moves up a generation at each accession, and William is next in line for the largest move of all.

The peer comparison puts the 2026 picture in context. The table below uses the most recent published estimate for each person, and the sources behind them.

Two things stand out. The first is that William is now richer than his father on the only measure that counts Duchy assets — the June 2026 accounts made that official, and it is the first time an heir has overtaken a monarch in the modern era. The second is how far ahead of his brother he is: Harry’s $60 million, earned largely since leaving royal duties, is less than half of William’s personal wealth and a fraction of the estate William controls. The brothers started with the same inheritance. The Duchy is the difference.

Social Media Presence

William has no personal social media accounts, and he has been outspoken about the damage social media can do. He has called for stronger regulation of online platforms, spoken about the effect of anonymous abuse on young people, and warned that the attention economy rewards outrage. The position is consistent with a man whose family has been pursued by cameras since he was a child — and it is also, in practice, a luxury: he does not need social media to be famous.

What he does have is the joint Kensington Royal presence he shares with Kate — accounts on Instagram, X and YouTube under the Prince and Princess of Wales’s name, run by their office and followed by millions of people. The feed mixes official engagements, behind-the-scenes photographs taken by Kate herself, and campaign material for the Earthshot Prize and Homewards. The most-liked posts are almost always family photographs: the children’s birthdays, Father’s Day, and the portraits Kate takes of the family at Anmer Hall and Adelaide Cottage. William’s own appearances are usually video — short clips of him visiting Earthshot finalists, talking to homeless charities, or playing football with young people — and they are shot in the informal, direct-to-camera style that has become the Palace’s answer to the polished royal portrait.

The social media numbers do not add to his net worth, and no estimate should count them. They matter for a different reason: they are the channel through which the monarchy now speaks to people under 40, and William is the member of the family who uses it best. His 2024 appearance on a podcast about mental health, his 2025 visit to an Earthshot finalist in Brazil, and his habit of answering questions from the public on video have all been distributed through the Kensington accounts, and all of them have reached audiences the Palace’s press releases never would.

Personal Life

William married Catherine Middleton on 29 April 2011 at Westminster Abbey, in a ceremony conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury and attended by 1,900 guests. They had been together, on and off, for eight years, and their relationship had survived the press attention, a brief split in 2007, and the long wait — the press called her “Waity Katie” — that preceded the engagement. The engagement ring was his mother’s sapphire, and the announcement, in November 2010, was made at St James’s Palace with a televised interview in which William said he had carried the ring in his rucksack for three weeks before proposing in Kenya.

The couple have three children: Prince George, born 22 July 2013; Princess Charlotte, born 2 May 2015; and Prince Louis, born 23 April 2018. George is second in line to the throne, and will one day inherit the Duchy of Cornwall from his father — the same estate William inherited from Charles. The children attend Lambrook School near Windsor, and the family have made a point of keeping their school lives as private as the press will allow.

The hardest year of William’s adult life was 2024, when Kate was diagnosed with cancer and underwent chemotherapy, and his father was diagnosed with cancer in the same months. William stepped back from public engagements to look after the family, and Kate’s announcement of her diagnosis in March 2024 — a video message filmed at Windsor — was one of the most-watched royal statements ever made. She completed chemotherapy in September 2024 and has since returned gradually to public duties. William has spoken since about the year as the hardest of his life, and about the toll it took on the family.

Outside royal duties, William’s private passions are the ones he has had since childhood: football — he is president of the Football Association and a lifelong Aston Villa supporter — polo, swimming, and the countryside. He has said that if he were not a royal he would want to be a pilot or a farmer, and the answer is revealing: the two jobs he named are the two working lives he has actually lived, and both of them paid him less than £50,000 a year. It is the closest he has come to saying what his money means to him: less than the work did.

Sources & Reporting

Frequently Asked Questions

Published on 9 November 2026. Last reviewed November 2026. Found an error? See our corrections policy.