Two weeks ago, I wrote about what Britain did to itself — the abolition of a two-hundred-year-old tax settlement, and what a country taxing out its own elite teaches everyone else about optionality. That piece was the autopsy. This one is the forwarding address.
Because the data has landed, and it is without precedent. Henley & Partners’ migration tracking puts the UK’s net millionaire outflow at roughly 16,500 for 2025 — the largest ever recorded from any country, more than double second-place China, and the first time in a decade of tracking that a European nation topped the table. The associated wealth is estimated north of $90 billion. Companies House data analyzed by the Financial Times shows nearly 3,800 UK company directors shifting abroad between October 2024 and July 2025, up 40 percent year over year. The names attached are not anonymous: the Ineos CFO, the former Reckitt chief, the founder of FTSE Russell.
The June piece asked why they left. The more useful question — the one that matters for anyone planning their own move — is where they landed. Because 16,500 households with effectively unlimited choice, professional advice, and acute motivation just ran the largest live experiment in destination selection ever conducted. Their choices are a revealed-preference map of what mobile capital actually values, as opposed to what jurisdictions advertise.
Read the map carefully. It does not say what you’d expect.
The ledger
Here’s where the world’s migrating millionaires netted out in 2025, per Henley’s tracking — the UK exodus flowing into a broader stream of roughly 142,000 millionaires who changed countries last year:
The United Arab Emirates absorbed about 9,800, the largest inflow on earth for the second consecutive year, carrying an estimated $63 billion. The United States took roughly 7,500 — still the deepest wealth market in existence, still absorbing, even as its own citizens’ renunciation filings doubled year over year (two different populations making two different decisions; more on that below). Italy took about 3,600. Switzerland about 3,000. Then the risers: Saudi Arabia near 2,400, Singapore 1,600, Portugal 1,400, Greece 1,200.
Four poles organize the whole map. The zero-tax pole (UAE, and increasingly Saudi): no personal income tax, transactional residency, no pretense that you’re joining a nation rather than renting a platform. The deep-market pole (US, Singapore): you pay real tax and get the world’s most liquid markets and institutions in exchange. The negotiated-certainty pole (Italy, Switzerland, Greece): you pay a fixed, contracted amount — Italy’s flat tax, Switzerland’s cantonal lump-sum — and in return the state promises not to change its mind about you. And the program pole (Portugal, the Caribbean): structured residency-for-investment routes, where what you’re buying is a documented pathway rather than a tax rate.
The pole that grew fastest relative to expectations is the third one. Which brings us to the most instructive single data point in the entire dataset.
Italy raised the price three times. They kept coming.
Italy’s flat-tax regime for new residents started life under €100,000 a year — pay the flat amount, and your foreign income is settled, full stop, for fifteen years, with no wealth tax and no obligation to even disclose foreign holdings. In late 2024, with demand surging, Rome raised it to €200,000 for new entrants. Inflows increased — Italy finished 2025 third in the world at +3,600, with Milan absorbing so much displaced London wealth that the Italian press took to calling it the Brexit of the rich. So in January 2026 Rome raised the price again, to €300,000 for new arrivals.
Triple the price in eighteen months. Demand rose the entire way.
Stop and take that seriously, because it violates everything a rate-shopper believes about this market. If mobile wealth were optimizing for the lowest tax bill, the UAE exists, and it costs zero. Italy tripled its price into competition from free — and gained share. The product Italy is selling is not a rate. It is certainty: a fixed number, contractual in feel, with a fifteen-year term, in a G7 country with EU membership, functioning courts, and a lifestyle argument that closes deals on its own. The buyers who chose Milan over Dubai paid €300,000 a year for the privilege of knowing what the deal is.
Now hold that against what Britain sold. The non-dom regime’s headline economics were, for many, better than Italy’s. What Britain could not offer was stability of terms — the regime had been politically radioactive for a decade, amended repeatedly, and finally abolished with no grandfathering for people who had built twenty-year lives around it. The UK’s product failed not on price but on counterparty risk. And the market has now published its verdict, in the only currency that doesn’t lie: people paid triple for a worse rate that won’t move, over a better rate that might.
If you retain one sentence from this piece, that’s the one. In jurisdiction selection, the rate is the brochure. The durability of the rate is the product.
This is not a UK story
The second thing the map shows is that Britain is the headline, not the phenomenon. For the first time in the tracking’s history, France posted a net millionaire outflow in 2025. So did Spain and Germany — also firsts — alongside Ireland, Norway, and Sweden. Norway’s 2023 wealth-tax increase pushed high earners into Switzerland at a pace that made its projections meaningless within a year. Spain shut its golden visa entirely in April 2025. The European Court of Justice struck down Malta’s citizenship program the same month. Britain itself had already closed its investor visa back in 2022.
Plot those events on one axis and the direction is uniform: core Europe is repricing mobile wealth upward and closing entry programs, while the absorption flows to the periphery and beyond — Italy, Greece, Portugal, the Gulf. The continent’s center is running the UK experiment in slower motion, and the UK data now tells everyone how that experiment ends.
For American readers, the relevance is direct, and it isn’t schadenfreude. It’s that you are watching the market you will eventually shop in being cleared by sixteen thousand buyers who got there first — with two consequences you should price today. The first is congestion: Milan property, Dubai school places, Lisbon fund-route capacity, and the calendars of the small number of genuinely competent cross-border advisors are all absorbing a demand shock. The second is repricing: every program that changed in the last twenty-four months changed in the same direction. Portugal doubled its citizenship timeline. Italy tripled its price. Spain and Malta closed doors outright. Greece restructured its zones upward. There is no example — none — of a major program becoming cheaper, faster, or more generous in this cycle. Acting on current rules locks current terms; waiting has, empirically, meant paying more for less, everywhere, without exception. That’s not a sales pitch. It’s the scoreboard.
And one American footnote from the data that deserves its own moment: US renunciation filings roughly doubled year over year in early 2025, with the processing queue reported above thirty thousand — even as the US absorbed 7,500 incoming millionaires. Both facts are true because they describe different people: the world’s wealth still wants into American markets, while a record number of Americans want optionality out of American jurisdiction. The country can be the world’s best place to invest and, for its own citizens’ planning purposes, a concentration risk — simultaneously. Readers of this publication already understood that. Now there’s a number on it.
What the map doesn’t tell you
Analytical honesty, as always. This dataset tracks millionaires — Henley’s methodology leans on investable wealth, and the destination preferences of a nine-figure family optimizing a lump-sum tax deal are not a template for a family with $1.5 million and two kids who need schools. The UAE that works brilliantly for a hedge-fund principal is a very different proposition at ordinary scale. Italy’s €300,000 flat tax is irrelevant below the income level where it beats ordinary rates. The map shows you what the most mobile capital values — certainty, durability, functioning institutions — and those lessons transfer down the wealth scale completely. The specific destinations don’t automatically. Where Americans at ordinary scale are actually landing, what it actually costs, and which of these jurisdictions holds up when you’re not arriving with a family office — that’s a different dataset, and it’s next month’s work: August, in this publication, is destination month, and it will be built the way we build everything here — who it’s right for, who it isn’t, and what’s quietly deteriorating.
The non-doms did you one real favor. They stress-tested the global menu with their own money, at scale, under time pressure, with the best advice money buys — and they published the results in the form of their forwarding addresses. The single loudest finding wasn’t a country. It was a principle: the people with the most options paid the highest premium not for the lowest rate, but for the deal least likely to be taken away.
They had somewhere to go because they’d kept options open before they needed them. That part transfers at every scale. It’s the whole reason this publication exists.
Borderless Living provides analysis and education, not legal, tax, or financial advice. Migration figures are estimates from published industry tracking and subject to methodological limitations. Regime terms cited are as of this writing and change frequently — verify current rules before acting.
The visa, the apostilles, the background check — those are the easy part. People get all of that right and still end up in trouble. Even people with accountants, lawyers, and wealth managers.
What goes wrong is further back. A decision that looked perfect ten moves ago, arriving now as a tax bill, a letter from a government, a check you didn’t plan to write. And nobody had to do anything wrong. They just never saw the whole board.
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I wonder if the folks who chose the UAE are rethinking their decision given the geopolitical upheaval that has taken place during the last six months.
Very interesting analysis.
I have to say that the weather and food is probably better in Italy than Britain. One wonders about the life-style choices that may have pushed people to consider a higher tax regime as well as stability.