Millionaires Are Leaving the UK: Top 12 Destinations

For two centuries Britain was where the world's rich wanted to live. That is changing fast. Migration advisers, wealth researchers and the taxman all now track a growing outflow of high-net-worth individuals, and the UK sits at the top of the global league table for the wrong reason. Here is what the data shows, each figure drawn from an authoritative source.

The scale of the exodus

The biggest millionaire outflow on record

The headline number is startling. The UK is projected to lose a net 16,500 dollar-millionaires in 2025, the largest outflow of wealth any country has recorded since the migration was first tracked, taking an estimated 66 billion pounds of investable assets with them. No other country comes close this year.¹

It doubled in a single year

The trend accelerated sharply. The UK lost about 10,800 millionaires in 2024, a 157 percent jump on the year before, the second-largest exodus in the world behind only China. What was a trickle has become a flood in the space of two budgets.²

A decade of decline

Zoom out and Britain is an outlier. Over the past decade the number of UK-resident millionaires fell by around 8 percent, while the United States gained 62 percent and Germany 15 percent. As other rich economies minted millionaires, the UK shed them.³

London has fallen out of the top five

The capital tells the story in miniature. London lost around 11,300 millionaires in 2024, more than any city in Europe, and dropped out of the world's five wealthiest cities for the first time. The city long seen as a magnet for global money is now a net exporter of it.⁴

Why the wealthy are leaving

The end of the non-dom regime

The trigger is tax, and one change above all. The non-domiciled regime, part of the UK tax system for over 200 years, was abolished from 6 April 2025, so long-term UK residents are now taxed on their worldwide income and gains. For globally mobile wealth, that removed the main reason to be based in Britain.⁵

Inheritance tax now follows the world

The bigger deterrent may be death duties. From April 2025 inheritance tax moved to a residence basis, bringing a former non-dom's worldwide assets into the UK's 40 percent inheritance tax net once resident for 10 years, and keeping them there for up to 10 years after leaving. Few things move a family faster than a tax on their global estate.⁶

And the rest of the tax bill went up

Other changes piled on. The 2024 Budget raised capital gains tax to 24 percent, and from January 2025 private school fees became subject to 20 percent VAT. Individually manageable, together they tipped the calculation for many wealthy households toward leaving.⁷

What is walking out the door

The stakes for the Treasury are large. HMRC recorded around 74,000 non-doms who paid a record 9 billion pounds in tax in the year to April 2024. Every departure removes not just a taxpayer but, often, an investor and an employer.⁸

What it could cost

Two in three plan to go

Surveys point to more to come. Research by Oxford Economics for Foreign Investors for Britain found nearly two-thirds of non-doms plan to leave within two years, and warned the reforms could end up costing the Treasury around 0.9 billion pounds by 2029/30 rather than raising money. If even a fraction follow through, the revenue maths turns negative.⁹

Each leaver takes a big tax bill

The per-head cost is high. The Adam Smith Institute projects the UK will lose the largest share of millionaires of any country this parliament, roughly a fifth, with each departing millionaire worth about 394,000 pounds a year to the Exchequer, equivalent to the tax of 49 average earners. Losing the very wealthy is expensive precisely because they pay so much.¹⁰

The counter-case: Britain still mints millionaires

It is not settled, though. UBS's global wealth research found the UK added more than 43,000 new dollar-millionaires in 2025, and that no major market ended the year with fewer millionaires than it began, because rising asset prices create wealth faster than migration removes it. The exodus is real, but the "Britain is emptying of the rich" framing is contested.¹¹

The top 12 destinations

Where does the departing wealth go? Henley's 2025 migration data ranks the biggest net gainers of millionaires, and the map is clear: low-tax hubs and warm, stable economies dominate.¹²

1. United Arab Emirates (Dubai): a net inflow of about 9,800 millionaires, the world's number one wealth magnet.
2. United States: around 7,500, still drawing the global rich despite its own tax debates.
3. Italy: about 3,600, powered by a flat tax for wealthy new residents.
4. Switzerland: roughly 3,000, the traditional safe haven.
5. Saudi Arabia: around 2,400, as the Gulf broadens its appeal.
6. Singapore: about 1,600, Asia's wealth-management centre.
7. Portugal: roughly 1,400, helped by residence and lifestyle incentives.
8. Greece: around 1,200, with its own flat-tax offer.
9. Australia: about 1,000, a perennial favourite.
10. Canada: around 1,000, despite a cooling investor-visa regime.
11. Hong Kong: about 800, rebuilding its millionaire base.
12. Japan: around 600, a newer entrant to the list.

Rival hubs are actively competing for the money. Italy, the third-placed destination, doubled its flat tax for wealthy newcomers from 100,000 to 200,000 euros in 2024 and raised it again to 300,000 euros for 2026 arrivals, and it is still pulling people in. When a 300,000-euro annual tax counts as a bargain, you can see what the UK is up against.¹³

Our read

Capital flight is the quiet cousin of business failure

A millionaire leaving is not an insolvency, but it belongs to the same story: an economy that struggles to hold investment, founders and capital is an economy where fewer businesses are started and more of the existing ones fail. The wealth exodus and the elevated rate of company insolvencies are two symptoms of the same weakness. You can track one of them, case by case, in the latest UK insolvencies; doing so early is what the InsolvencyRadar service is built for.¹⁴