Why Millionaires and Billionaires Keep Choosing the UAE Over Everywhere Else

Every year for the last several, a headline version of this story runs: the UAE is the world’s number one destination for relocating millionaires, and the UK is losing more of them than any other country. That much is genuinely well documented. What gets lost is that the size of the trend is a real, live argument among the people who study it, not a settled number, and the reasons wealthy people actually give for moving are more specific than “no income tax.”

The headline numbers, and where they come from

Henley & Partners, the residence-and-citizenship advisory firm that produces the most widely cited data on this, projected a record net inflow of 9,800 millionaires into the UAE in 2025, bringing an estimated USD 63 billion in investable wealth with them, more than any other country tracked. The UK, in the same report, was projected to lose 16,500 millionaires, more than double the outflow from China, the first time a European country has led the world in wealthy departures in a decade of Henley tracking the data.

The proximate trigger most commonly cited is the UK’s abolition of its non-dom tax regime, announced by the previous government and carried through by the current one, which ended the ability of UK residents with a permanent home elsewhere to shield foreign income and assets from UK tax. Worldwide income and foreign trusts became fully taxable, and capital gains tax was raised alongside it.

The part that doesn’t make the headlines: this is genuinely disputed

Here’s where I’d be doing you a disservice if I just repeated the 9,800 and 16,500 figures as settled fact. HMRC’s own data, reported by the Financial Times, shows the actual number of non-doms leaving the UK tracking at or below the government’s own official forecasts, not the dramatic exodus implied by the wealth-migration headlines. The Tax Justice Network has gone further, counting roughly 11,000 news articles in a single year amplifying exodus claims that, in their reading, outran what the original data supported.

The counter-argument isn’t one-sided either. Some practitioners who work directly with relocating wealthy clients argue the opposite: that Henley’s figures actually understate the real number of departures, particularly among upper-middle-class professionals earning £150,000 to £500,000 a year, a group large enough to matter for the UK’s tax base but too far below “millionaire” to show up in wealth-migration indices at all.

What wealthy individuals actually say when they move

Look past the aggregate numbers and the individual cases are more informative than the totals. Norwegian shipping billionaire John Fredriksen relocated citing the UK’s non-dom abolition directly. British hedge fund manager Michael Platt moved his primary residence and family office to the UAE in June 2025. Shravin Bharti Mittal, part of India’s Bharti family, has pointed to the UK’s tightening tax treatment specifically. Egyptian billionaire Nassef Sawiris relocated his family office to the UAE in late 2023, ahead of the non-dom changes even landing. The through-line in the Western cases is consistently tax policy, not lifestyle marketing.

The structural draws behind the individual decisions are well established and mostly unglamorous: no personal income or capital gains tax, no inheritance tax for expats, straightforward 100% foreign business ownership in most sectors, and a residence system built to make relocating a family office administratively simple rather than a multi-year process.

The pattern that predates the tax story: instability elsewhere

Tax policy is the newest driver, but it isn’t the only one, and it isn’t even the oldest. The UAE has absorbed successive waves of wealth from places where the alternative wasn’t a higher tax bill, it was genuine instability at home. Russian capital moved to Dubai in scale after 2022, as sanctions and the war in Ukraine made Western financial centres unworkable for a large pool of Russian business figures; researchers at ISPI have documented this as a structural shift in where Russian elite wealth is now based, not a temporary parking spot. Similar patterns, at smaller scale, have played out with wealthy families from Lebanon and Iran over the years, for the same underlying reason: the UAE offers a stable, well-regulated place to hold and grow capital when home doesn’t.

It’s worth being honest that this cuts both ways. Dubai’s own reputation as an unconditional safe haven took a real test during the 2026 Iran war, when the conflict reached UAE territory directly rather than staying at a comfortable distance, and it prompted genuine questions from analysts about whether that “safe haven” perception could hold under regional pressure. I’ve written separately about what actually happened to Dubai’s property market through that period and the de-escalation since, including the real numbers on how buyers and sellers behaved while it was live, rather than the guesswork. The short version: capital kept moving here, but “safe haven” isn’t a status that’s immune to stress-testing, and treating it as one is a mistake.

Why this matters if you’re actually deciding, not just reading

None of the above is a reason to move capital anywhere on its own, and I’m not qualified to give tax or immigration advice, nor should anyone take relocation advice from a property page. What it should tell you is that the wealth arriving in the UAE right now is coming for reasons that are specific and largely durable: a tax structure that isn’t changing, a business environment built for exactly this kind of relocation, and, for a meaningful subset, genuinely limited good alternatives at home. That’s a different, more durable kind of demand than a market riding pure sentiment, and it’s part of why the population and transaction numbers referenced elsewhere on this site keep holding up even when the commentary turns cautious.

Every figure and claim above is sourced and linked, including the ones that disagree with each other. This is not tax, legal or immigration advice; speak to a qualified adviser in the relevant jurisdiction before acting on any of it.