Where the Non-Doms Actually Went: A Two-Year Audit

By Griskin

Published 15 May 2026 Reading time: 13 minutes

When the British government abolished the non-domiciled tax regime on 6 April 2025, the public conversation that followed was largely binary. On one side: a tax loophole had been closed and London's wealthy residents would pay their fair share. On the other: the talent and capital would flee, the public finances would suffer, and a generation of internationally mobile families would disappear from the city's restaurants, schools, and property market. Both readings were partly correct. Neither was complete.

Two years on, the picture is clearer than the headlines have made it. Roughly 16,500 millionaires left the United Kingdom in 2025, according to Henley & Partners migration data. That figure represents the highest single-year millionaire outflow in any country during the entire decade. The non-dom regime in particular had served roughly 74,000 individuals before its abolition, and the exit from London has been geographically concentrated, behaviourally distinctive, and far more revealing about the next chapter of Prime London property than the consensus narrative suggests.

This piece is a two-year audit of where the money actually went, based on published migration data, named individuals on the public record, real estate market data from receiving cities, and patterns I have seen across our own advisory work at Griskin since the announcement. It is also, candidly, a piece about what the exit means for the buyers who stayed, the families considering returning, and the assumptions the Prime London market was operating on that have now been disproved.

A note on what follows. I have not used the personal stories of Griskin clients in this piece. Confidentiality matters, and in this category it matters more than usual. The patterns described below are drawn from named individuals whose moves are already in the public record (Rio Ferdinand to Dubai, Nassef Sawiris to Italy and the UAE, multiple figures quoted in the FT, Bloomberg, and The Times), from receiving-country property and migration data, and from broader market analysis. Where I describe a "type" of family, I am describing a pattern, not a person.

The numbers, before the narrative

Before any analysis, the numbers matter. Most commentary on the non-dom exit has been narrative-led rather than data-led, and the data is materially different from the prevailing story.

In 2025, the UK lost 16,500 millionaires on a net basis, the largest outflow of any country worldwide according to Henley & Partners. Of those, the most reliable estimates indicate that approximately 9,500 had left in 2024 already, meaning the year following the formal announcement of non-dom abolition produced a 74 percent acceleration in millionaire outflow versus the prior year. The composition of that outflow is what matters most. 2024 outflows were dominated by ultra-billionaire-tier wealth heading to Dubai. 2025 outflows skewed materially toward entrepreneurs and family offices with five to one hundred million pounds of investible wealth, for whom Italy and other European jurisdictions, rather than the Gulf, became the natural destination.

3,600 of those millionaires chose Italy in 2025. That single figure exceeds the combined inflows to Monaco and Switzerland in the same year, according to Henley's data. Italy's flat-rate tax regime, which has earned the nickname svuota Londra (literally, "Emptying London") in European financial circles, now hosts over 4,500 active participants paying €300,000 per year on all foreign income regardless of how much they earn.

The other top destinations, in declining order, were the United Arab Emirates, the United States, Switzerland, Singapore, Greece, Portugal, and increasingly Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Malta. Each represents a different bet on a different combination of tax, security, and lifestyle priorities, and the patterns are worth reading carefully because they tell you something about what the families who left actually valued, and what they decided was worth giving up.

Pattern one: The billionaire move to Dubai, 2022 to 2024, has largely run its course

The first wave of post-non-dom departures, beginning even before the formal abolition was announced in the March 2024 Budget, was overwhelmingly to Dubai. By the time the regime was formally ended, the established Dubai destinations, Palm Jumeirah, Emirates Hills, Dubai Hills Estate, Bluewaters Island, and the marina developments, had absorbed thousands of British and London-resident HNW families. The drivers were familiar: zero personal income tax, zero capital gains tax, zero inheritance tax, sophisticated international banking, established UK private schooling (Brighton College Dubai, Repton, Dubai College, Kings' School Dubai), and a UAE Golden Visa regime that gave ten-year residency to investors with property holdings of AED 2 million and above.

The named individuals on this trajectory include Rio Ferdinand and his family, who relocated to Dubai in 2024 citing tax considerations openly in UK press coverage. Nassef Sawiris, the Egyptian billionaire and co-owner of Aston Villa, moved his residency to a combination of Italy and the UAE and told the Financial Times in early 2025 that "everyone in his circle" was considering the same move. Several FTSE 100 executives, hedge fund principals, and family office founders made the same journey through 2023 and 2024, in many cases buying both Dubai residences and properties in Abu Dhabi's emerging luxury market on Saadiyat Island and the Reem Island corridor.

What is happening in 2026, two years on, is more interesting than the initial migration. The Dubai cohort is beginning to fragment in two directions. The first group remains committed to Dubai as a primary base, having now established schools, business operations, and family routines. They are the genuine relocations. The second group, larger than the public commentary acknowledges, is treating Dubai as a tax-residency anchor while spending materially less time there than the Golden Visa rules would suggest, often splitting their actual presence between Dubai, a European base (increasingly Milan), and frequent return visits to London. The Iran conflict in 2026 accelerated this fragmentation. Reports indicate roughly one in eight British residents of the Gulf region left following the outbreak of hostilities, and the question many UAE residents have been quietly asking themselves about long-term physical security in the region has now become public.

The property implication for these families has been significant. Dubai's luxury market, having absorbed enormous British and European inflows from 2022 through 2025, is showing the first signs of saturation at the upper end. Palm Jumeirah villa transaction volumes peaked in mid-2025 and have softened since. The next wave of relocations is no longer defaulting to Dubai. It is choosing Italy.

Pattern two: The Milan move, 2024 to present, is the genuine new chapter

The single most important property and capital migration story of the past eighteen months, and the one most underreported in UK press coverage, is the formation of a wealth corridor between London and Milan.

The trigger was the abolition of the UK non-dom regime combined with the maturity of Italy's imposta sostitutiva flat-tax regime. Introduced in 2017 at €100,000 per year on foreign income, raised to €200,000 in 2024 and €300,000 from January 2026, the regime now hosts over 4,500 active participants. For a family earning, for example, £3 million per year on foreign assets, the difference between paying UK income tax at 45 percent (£1.35 million) and the Italian flat tax (€300,000, or roughly £258,000) is north of £1 million per year. Over a decade, the saving exceeds £10 million. As one Italian wealth lawyer put it in a recent FT piece: small change for the genuinely wealthy.

What makes the Milan corridor different from the Dubai migration is the type of family making the move. Where Dubai attracted the ultra-billionaire tier and the international finance and football diaspora, Milan is attracting the entrepreneurs, the family office founders, the senior partners of professional services firms, and the European-cultured second-generation wealth holders. These are families for whom Dubai's social fabric does not fit, who want children educated in European institutions, who want walkable cities and quality dining and seasonal weather, and for whom the visible saving from the Italian regime is large enough to justify the move but for whom Italy's quality-of-life offer is the actual draw.

The Milan property market has responded accordingly. Quadrilatero della Moda, the historic luxury district around Via Monte Napoleone and the fashion quadrangle, now trades at €15,000 to €25,000 per square metre, with prime penthouses exceeding €18,500 per square metre. Brera, the artistic and cultural heart of central Milan, sits at €9,000 to €14,000 per square metre. Porta Nuova, the modern business and residential district anchored by Bosco Verticale and the UniCredit Tower, ranges from €8,500 to €13,000 per square metre. Milan property prices have risen 38 percent over the past five years. The city has overtaken Venice as Italy's most expensive residential market.

The composition of buyers in these neighbourhoods has shifted materially. Where the 2018 to 2022 prime Milan market was dominated by Italian buyers with a meaningful Russian and Eastern European overlay, the 2024 to 2026 market is increasingly British, Northern European, American, and dual-national families holding UK passports. The Brera and Porta Nuova new-build sectors specifically are absorbing London capital at a rate that local estate agencies were not staffed for two years ago. Major Milan agents now routinely advertise their English-language services, and several have opened London satellite offices to capture the outbound family pipeline.

The thesis behind the Milan move is more nuanced than the Dubai thesis. It is not purely about tax. It is about a stable EU jurisdiction, a sophisticated luxury infrastructure, accessible private schooling (St Louis, Sir James Henderson, the European School), a city that functions on a human scale, and a wealth corridor to nearby Italian lifestyle destinations: Lake Como, Forte dei Marmi, the Tuscan countryside, Costa Smeralda. The family that moves to Milan typically buys not one property but two or three: the Milan base, a holiday home, and often a Roman or Florentine pied-à-terre.

Pattern three: The "structured stay" cohort, who left on paper but kept the London property

The third pattern is the most strategically interesting and the most relevant for the Prime London property market specifically. It is also the least visible in the headline migration statistics.

A meaningful subset of non-doms who formally left the UK in 2024 or 2025 did not actually liquidate their London holdings. They restructured. The London townhouse, the Knightsbridge flat, the Surrey country house, in many cases remains owned by the family, held through restructured corporate or trust vehicles, and is used either by adult children studying or working in London, let to corporate or diplomatic tenants on long fixed-term arrangements, or simply held vacant pending the resolution of UK tax policy over the next political cycle.

This pattern is the single most important reason that the dire predictions about Prime London property collapsing on non-dom exit have not materialised in the way Treasury models implied. The properties did not all come on the market. Many were structurally moved into different ownership vehicles, with the families themselves becoming non-UK tax-resident while retaining the asset for future use. The Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation has noted similar patterns in its sanctions enforcement work, where structurally complex ownership has remained intact despite changed individual tax positions.

For these families, the calculation was straightforward. Selling a £15 million Prime London property in a soft market to fund a £15 million Milan or Dubai purchase produces a meaningful loss against peak valuations. Retaining the London asset, restructuring it for tax efficiency under the new regime, and acquiring the new primary residence with separately structured capital preserves the option to return to London if political and tax conditions improve. Given the political shifts following the 7 May 2026 local elections, where Reform UK's gains have made the scheduled 2027 income tax increases and 2028 mansion tax politically uncertain, this option value is now materially higher than it was a year ago.

The implication for the Prime London property market is significant and counter-intuitive. The properties did not flood the market. Liquidity is not, in fact, being driven by non-dom exit supply. Supply at the £5 million-plus level was actually 35 percent below the prior year in Q1 2026, with new listings down 35 percent quarter-on-quarter in late 2025, according to Coutts data. The narrative of a flood of forced selling has been wrong throughout the past two years. The exit happened. The property exit, in many cases, did not.

What this means for buyers staying or returning to London in 2026

Three observations matter most.

The first is that the non-dom exit, at least the part that was going to happen, has largely happened. Beauchamp Estates noted recently that the bulk of the exit is now "absorbed," and our own advisory work supports that read. The families that were going to leave have left. The families who chose to stay have made that choice deliberately, often with sophisticated UK tax restructuring in place. The continued speculation about further outflows is, at this point, largely tail risk rather than central case.

The second is that the receiving cities, particularly Milan and Dubai, are absorbing the relocations at premium prices. A family that sold their £15 million Knightsbridge flat in 2024 to relocate to Dubai was buying into a market that has since softened at the top end. A family that did the same in early 2026 is paying near-peak prices in Milan for properties that have already risen 38 percent over five years. The arbitrage that motivated the early moves has compressed. For families currently considering the move, the financial case is materially weaker than it was eighteen months ago, particularly if the UK political and tax direction shifts further over the next three years.

The third, and most relevant for Griskin's typical client, is that the families who left are not always staying gone. The Henley data shows a measurable trickle of returning UK residents in early 2026, partly driven by Gulf instability and partly by family ties that were under-priced at the moment of departure. Children at British universities, ageing parents in London, business interests that did not relocate cleanly, schools in West London that proved hard to replicate abroad. The structured stay pattern (keeping the London property while becoming non-UK resident) means many families have a more frictionless return path than the headline migration data suggests.

If you are a family that left in 2024 or 2025 and is now reconsidering, the property side of the calculation favours you in a way it would not have eighteen months ago. Prime Central London valuations are 20 to 30 percent below peak in core postcodes, supply is contracting, and the buyer pool is materially smaller than at the 2014 to 2018 peak. For families willing to take a position on a 2027 or 2028 political shift on tax, the entry price is structurally attractive. For families who never left, the same conditions support a hold rather than a sell strategy.

What the Treasury did not anticipate

A final observation, more candid than the rest of the piece, is worth flagging.

The Treasury's modelling of the non-dom abolition assumed that affected families would either pay the higher tax and stay, or leave and pay the cost of leaving. The model treated families as binary decision-makers facing a single choice. What the data shows is that families are sophisticated, structurally fluid, and treating tax residency, property ownership, family location, and professional activity as separately optimisable variables. The £33.8 billion of non-dom assets that left the UK in 2025, on independent estimates, has not gone to a single place or under a single set of rules. It has dispersed into a portfolio of jurisdictions, often with each family using two or three simultaneously.

That sophistication is not a flaw in the system. It is what the families have always done with their wealth. The error in the Treasury's modelling was assuming the policy change would simplify behaviour. It complicated it.

For Griskin, advising clients through this transition, the practical takeaway has been straightforward. Decisions about tax residency, primary residence location, secondary property holdings, and the children's schooling jurisdiction are now genuinely independent decisions, made in combination but optimised separately. The family that buys in Milan does not necessarily sell in London. The family that becomes Dubai tax-resident does not necessarily move physically. The family that registers under the Italian flat-tax regime may still spend more nights of the year in their Surrey house than in their Milan apartment. The advisory work is to help them think clearly about each variable rather than treating the move as a single decision.

The bottom line

The non-dom exit was real, it was substantial, and it was geographically concentrated. Roughly 16,500 UK millionaires left in 2025, with Italy receiving more inbound wealth migration than Monaco and Switzerland combined, and Dubai having absorbed the earlier and larger wave from 2022 to 2024. The receiving cities have priced in the inbound capital and are now expensive to enter at peak. The Prime London property market did not collapse on the exit because much of the exited capital retained its London holdings structurally rather than disposing of them.

What the data shows, two years on, is a more complex and more optimistic picture for serious participants in the Prime London market than the consensus narrative has acknowledged. The families who left are sophisticated, multi-jurisdictional, and increasingly fluid in their residency choices. Their London holdings remain. Their potential return remains. And the conditions that would prompt that return, particularly tax policy resolution, are now in active political flux.

For buyers considering Prime London in 2026, the question is no longer whether the non-dom exit signals further decline. It is whether the structural advantages of entering Prime Central London at a 20 to 30 percent discount to peak, in a market with contracting supply and politically uncertain tax overhang, are now worth more than the risk of further softening. On our reading, for buyers with a five to ten year horizon and an appetite for political optionality, they are.

If you are weighing a Prime London or international property decision in the current environment, and want a confidential conversation about your specific position, you can reach Griskin at info@griskin.co.uk or +44 7427 533 006. Initial conversations are confidential and without obligation, in English or Russian.