The UK’s Billionaires Just Took a City’s Worth of Tax With Them

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If you’re new here: I retired at 35 using options income and geo-arbitrage, and I write and teach people about putting your money (and yourself) where it’s treated best.

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The Canary in the Coal Mine

I teach students and clients how geo-arbitrage works, and I regularly hold the UK up as the canary in the coal mine. It’s where the rest of the Western world can watch what happens when tax policy keeps tightening on everyone, from workers to business owners to the people with the most options of all.

In the UK, right now, the poor canary is on a ventilator.

Henley & Partners forecast a net 16,500 millionaires leaving the UK in 2025, the biggest outflow of any country on Earth. For the first time in a decade of tracking, a European country topped that table.

I’m the last bloke who’ll hate on rich people, and I’m not about to suggest we go full communist and confiscate the lot. What I want to do is show you, in plain numbers, what happens when someone with real money decides a country is no longer good for their wealth, their security or their happiness, and takes it somewhere friendlier.

It leaves a hole. A big one.

A Bristol-Sized Hole

The UK’s departing billionaires have already left a Bristol-sized hole in the tax take. That’s the same as losing the income tax of roughly 484,000 ordinary taxpayers, every year. Bristol has about 494,000 people. Cebr’s central forecast has the figure climbing to around 556,000 a year by the end of this parliamentary term.

Add up the whole parliamentary term and it’s over 2 million taxpayers’ worth of income tax gone.

In Australia, that’s more than the whole of Greater Adelaide, home to 1.47 million people. Imagine Adelaide turning around tomorrow and going, “Nah bro, not sending you my tax anymore.” What does Canberra do?

In New Zealand, it’s more than all of Auckland’s 1.8 million, a region that produces around 38% of the country’s GDP on its own.

Somebody covers that gap. The Brits are about to find out who, when the new government delivers its first Budget.

Who Left, and Where They Went

Bloomberg’s analysis puts the outflow at £120 billion ($160 billion): more than a dozen people with multibillion-pound fortunes have left or loosened ties since Labour came to power, chasing friendlier tax regimes. That’s more than the combined wealth of the UK-based billionaires still on its index.

More than half of Britain’s billionaire money has left the building.

The roll call:

• Steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal, worth more than £30 billion on Bloomberg’s index, is now Swiss resident for tax and spends much of his time in Dubai.
• Hedge fund billionaire Alan Howard and private equity billionaire Jeremy Coller both picked Switzerland.
• Hedge fund billionaire Chris Rokos, Britain’s third-biggest taxpayer last year, is moving his residency to Greece and opening an office in Athens. Swapping London drizzle for Greek sunshine. Can’t say I blame him.
• Property billionaire David Reuben has just moved to Monaco with his £9.9 billion. He isn’t even counted in the £120bn.

Half the group were gone in the weeks before the April 2025 reforms kicked in. They read the room early.

One fair caveat. The £120bn is total net worth. It doesn’t mean £120bn in cash physically left the country. What actually hurts is the tax that pile used to throw at the Treasury every year, and most of that has gone with it.

The Napkin Math

HMRC expects the average income taxpayer to pay £8,270 in 2025-26. Keep that number handy.

Rokos paid around £330 million in tax last year. For a billionaire, that’s probably not life-changing money. For the Treasury, it’s the income tax of roughly 40,000 ordinary punters.

Rutland has 41,443 people. One hedgie was carrying an entire county on his back.

So that’s the equivalent of 40,000 taxpayers gone because you pissed off one guy with your policies to the point where he went, “Nah, see you later.” On the jet. Bye.

Now extrapolate that across the board.

James Quarmby, a wealth lawyer at Stephenson Harwood, estimates the non-dom exodus could already be costing the Treasury £4 billion a year. Divide by £8,270 and you get the 484,000. For perspective, Leeds and Birmingham together paid £4.23 billion in income tax in 2022/23.

Cebr’s central case uses the OBR’s own modelling and assumes a quarter of non-doms leave. It has tax receipts £4.6 billion lower in the final year of this parliamentary term, and £17 billion lower across the whole term. That’s around 556,000 taxpayers a year, and more than 2 million over the full term. Birmingham has 1.18 million people. You’d need Birmingham and most of it again.

Then there’s the concentration problem. Government figures cited by Bloomberg show the top 1% of earners pay about 27% of all income tax. When your revenue leans that hard on a few thousand people with passports and planes, every departure shows up on the spreadsheet.

Pick whichever number you like. None of them are pretty.

What Did the UK Expect?

The UK swapped non-dom status for a four-year Foreign Income and Gains regime, and pulled the global estates of 10-year residents into inheritance tax at 40%. Capital gains tax went up too, topping out at 24%.

The modelling assumed a quarter of non-doms with trusts and 12% without would leave. About 1,200 people.

Mate, these people own planes.

In fairness, LSE researchers predicted in 2022 that fewer than 100 would go. Nobody has settled the headcount yet. The money has voted, though.

The Budget, and the Letter

Here’s where it gets interesting.

Burnham has said his government may ask for a little more in tax, and has suggested that could include a wealth tax. In July, 120 millionaires organized by Patriotic Millionaires wrote to him asking to be taxed more, claiming a 2% tax on wealth above £10 million could raise over £24 billion a year.

Lovely gesture. Lads, the Debt Management Office takes donations. Knock yourselves out.

Look at the timing, though. That £24bn is calculated on a wealth base that has spent the last two years moving to Monaco. You can’t tax a pile that’s already in Dubai.

Three Doors, All Bad

Once the hole is there, a government has one good door: change the policy, make the place friendlier for investment and business again, and give people a reason to come home.

If it won’t walk through that one, it’s left loading a heavier burden onto whoever stays, or borrowing its way out and leaving itself less room when the next recession turns up. Either way it becomes a spiral. Each squeeze gives the next group of mobile people a reason to leave, which widens the hole, which brings on the next squeeze.

The Canaries Down Under Have Chesty Coughs Too

This is why I keep banging on about the UK. The same issues are starting to creep into Australia and New Zealand.

Australia’s May Budget proposes scrapping the 50% CGT discount from 1 July 2027 and replacing it with indexation, plus a new 30% minimum tax on capital gains. Advisers are calling it the biggest change to capital gains tax since 1999.

Plenty of Aussies think buying property across the ditch solves it. It doesn’t, and I broke down why in Buying a Kiwi Rental to Dodge the ATO? Yeah, Nah!

New Zealand has the borrowing problem I just described. Fitch moved its outlook to negative in March, saying meaningful debt reduction was getting harder to picture, with the election adding uncertainty. Moody’s followed in April. Kiwis vote on 7 November.

And the people are already moving. I’m getting calls all the time from Aussies who’ve had enough and want a strategy out. My feeds are full of people showing off their new lives in Italy and the UAE. If that’s you, I’ve put the whole process into the Australian Tax Residency Escape Plan 2026.

I made the same argument about Division 296 and the NZ Greens’ wealth tax: wealth taxes poll beautifully and collect badly. The UK is now the live case study. Worth watching all three.

The Bit That Should Worry Everyone Else

Picture it like this. You invite the whole of the UK to dinner, all 69 million of them, and order large: the lobster and the champagne. Then right after dessert, a handful of guests whose share of the bill would have covered over half a million people cheekily call an Uber and slip out the side door. Everyone still at the table gets to carve up the bill.

Every pound that leaves with a billionaire gets replaced by someone, and the someone is the middle.

It’s already happening quietly. The personal allowance, higher-rate and additional-rate thresholds are frozen at £12,570, £50,270 and £125,140 until 2030-31, and the OBR expects the freezes to pull 5.2 million extra people into income tax between 2022-23 and 2030-31. HMRC projected 7.08 million higher-rate taxpayers for 2025-26, up from 4.4 million in 2021-22. That’s fiscal drag. Nobody voted for it.

So are the middle earners leaving yet? Honest answer: not in big numbers. The ONS says British emigration has been broadly stable in recent years.

But look under the bonnet. An estimated 246,000 British nationals left in the year to December 2025, more than double the 110,000 who moved back. Around two-thirds of Brits who emigrated in the year to March 2025 were aged 16 to 34.

The young ones are the tell. They have the fewest roots and the most portable skills, and they’re the people the Treasury needs paying tax for the next 40 years.

It’s a digital world. A laptop and decent wifi is all it takes. If the fix for a billionaire-sized hole is squeezing the middle harder, the exit of capital moves from the top floor down into the middle.

The Middle-Class Version of the Playbook

Mittal’s version needs a jet. Yours needs a laptop and some homework.

The same countries courting billionaires run cheaper deals for working people.

Spain (Beckham Law). Employment income up to €600,000 is taxed at a flat 24% for six years, and remote workers for foreign companies on the Digital Nomad Visa can apply. Read the fine print: most freelancers registered as autónomos don’t qualify unless they fit the Startup Law’s entrepreneur or highly qualified categories. At lower incomes, the flat 24% can cost more than Spain’s normal scale, which starts at 19%. I live here, so I’ve watched plenty of people get this wrong.

Portugal (IFICI). Approval gets you a 20% flat rate on eligible Portuguese work income plus an exemption on most foreign income, for 10 years. It’s much narrower than the old NHR, built around listed professions like company directors, engineers, doctors, academics and ICT specialists, and foreign pensions are out.

Territorial tax countries. Places like Panama only tax income earned locally. That’s how I retired at 35. Patch-switching between countries like this is the whole game for location-independent income.

Before you book the flight, know the UK exit traps:

• The Statutory Residence Test. Your day counts and UK ties decide whether you’ve actually left, whatever your address says. I broke down how residency really gets decided in Your Tax Residency Can Be Destroyed By A Pizza Delivery.
• Temporary non-residence. Come back within five years and some gains realized while you were away can be taxed anyway.
• The inheritance tax tail. Anyone UK resident for 10 of the last 20 years stays in the UK inheritance tax net for 3 to 10 years after leaving, depending on how long they lived there.

And if your country charges you for the privilege of leaving, read The Exit Tax: What It Actually Costs You to Leave before you book anything.

Start with lifestyle. Pick somewhere you’d actually want to live, because a tax rate won’t make you happy in a town you hate. Then check the tax, and make sure your business or income works from there. A cheap rate in a country where you can’t earn is a holiday with paperwork.

Remote Income That Moves With You

Geo-arbitrage only works if your income travels. A UK salary tied to a UK desk keeps you tied to UK tax.

Options premium doesn’t care which country your laptop is in. I sell cash secured puts and covered calls from wherever I happen to be, and the members of the Alpha Desk do the same from all over the world. It’s repeatable monthly income that has been paying for my life for the past 5 years.

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Money Goes Where It’s Treated Well

I retired at 35 in Panama using geo-arbitrage, so I’m the last bloke who’ll judge a billionaire for doing the same thing with a bigger boat.

Money goes where it’s treated well. So do the people who own it.

If you’re in the UK, Australia or New Zealand, hit reply and tell me: is your country starting to sound like the canary? And if you’ve got ideas for what I should rant about next, chuck those in too. I read every one.

Cheers
Andy
Valencia, Spain