Every June the investment migration industry publishes its big number, and every June the headlines repeat it. This year the number was missing.
The Henley Private Wealth Migration Report 2026, released on 16 June 2026 by the residence and citizenship advisory firm Henley & Partners, arrived with a new vocabulary instead. According to the firm's press release, the world's wealthiest are now building "sovereign portfolios" of residence rights, citizenships, investments, and business interests across multiple jurisdictions. Parag Khanna, whose firm AlphaGeo provided the analytical modelling, put it more sharply: "The wealthy individual of 2026 is no longer selecting a single country. They are constructing a portfolio of jurisdictions."
The idea is worth taking seriously. So is the source. Both deserve a close look.
What Changed in the 2026 Report
For years the headline of Henley's wealth migration research was a forecast of how many millionaires would move. Its 2025 edition, produced with the wealth intelligence firm New World Wealth, projected that "a record-breaking 142,000 millionaires" would relocate internationally in 2025, and that the UK would lose 16,500 of them, the largest net outflow of any country. The earlier Brief on the 2025 edition, Fact or Marketing Hype?, took them apart.
The 2026 edition replaces the forecast with a scoring system. The new Global Wealth Mobility Framework rates jurisdictions across 12 dimensions and 38 weighted indicators, including tax, rule of law, quality of life, residence pathways, family inclusion and geopolitical resilience. The scores for some of the countries in the release:
- UAE: 85.3
- Singapore: 79.5
- New Zealand: 75.8
- Germany: 69.7
- UK: 68.3
- France: 65.7
- United States: 62.3
The release is explicit that the score "is not intended to measure economic success or migration flows." Its notes to editors say the change "should not be interpreted as a move away from wealth migration analysis" and does not rule out millionaire estimates in future editions.
Whatever the reasons, the one number that used to anchor the whole debate is not in this year's release. That alone is worth noting before you rely on anything else in it.
Read Who Is Talking
Henley & Partners describes itself in the release as an "international residence and citizenship advisory firm." It sells the product that the report describes. That does not make the report wrong. It does mean that its most specific figures come from the firm's own client pipeline rather than from population data.
The release contains several of those figures:
- Applications from people with a UK address rose 15% between 2024 and 2025, and British citizens now make up almost half of the firm's UK-address applicants, up from 8% in 2018.
- Enquiries from German nationals rose 16% between the fourth quarter of 2025 and the first quarter of 2026.
- Applications from US nationals doubled in 2025 compared with the previous year.
- Enquiries from UAE-based individuals rose 41% between the fourth quarter of 2025 and the first quarter of 2026.
These numbers show rising demand for residence and citizenship options among the firm's clients. They are a useful signal. They are not a measure of how many wealthy people actually left a country. For that you need official data, and official data moves more slowly and says less dramatic things.
What the Official UK Data Says
On 30 July 2026, HM Revenue and Customs published its annual statistics on non-domiciled taxpayers. For the tax year ending April 2025:
- HMRC estimates at least 81,900 non-domiciled and deemed domiciled taxpayers, 1% fewer than the 83,100 of the year before.
- Their combined tax and National Insurance liabilities were £13.6 billion, up 9% on the previous year.
- Around 9,000 people flowed out of the non-domiciled population, fewer than the 11,200 of the year before. Around 8,600 newly arrived, fewer than 10,000 the year before.
Two cautions apply. First, this is the last tax year under the old rules. On 6 April 2025 the UK replaced the remittance basis with a new regime based on residence, so the effect of that change is not yet in these figures. Second, non-domiciled taxpayers and millionaires are not the same population, so these numbers cannot directly confirm or refute any millionaire estimate.
What the official data does show is that, up to April 2025, the non-dom population was shrinking slowly while paying more tax. The dramatic story and the measured story are not the same story, and the measured one for the post-reform years has not been published yet.
Why the Portfolio Idea Is Right Anyway
Put the marketing aside and the core idea stands on its own facts. The last few years have shown, again and again, that rules which families built their lives around can change quickly.
Tax regimes end. The UK's remittance basis ended on 6 April 2025. Its replacement, the 4-year foreign income and gains regime, is only available to people in their first four years of UK tax residence after at least ten years of non-residence. Under the old rules, HMRC's own statistics explain, non-doms only became deemed domiciled after 15 of the previous 20 tax years of UK residence. A relief that could run for up to 15 years now lasts four. The consequences for London are covered in London After Non-Dom.
Residence routes close. The Henley release itself cites the UK's closure of its Tier 1 Investor visa, the end of Spain's golden visa and Portugal's withdrawal of its real estate investment route. Each was a door that families had planned to walk through.
Citizenship routes can be struck down. On 29 April 2025 the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in Commission v Malta that Malta's investor citizenship scheme was contrary to EU law. The Court's press release summarises the principle: "The acquisition of Union citizenship cannot result from a commercial transaction." A route to a European passport was closed by a court, not by a parliament. The background is in the EU's war on citizenship by investment.
Citizenship itself can carry a cost. The Henley release names citizenship-based taxation among the factors pushing affluent Americans to build international options. For a US citizen, the passport brings a tax obligation that follows them wherever they live.
The logic of a portfolio follows directly. If any single country can change its tax rules, close its residence routes or lose its investor channels within a year or two, then a family whose entire life, assets and legal status depend on one country carries concentrated risk. Basil Mohr-Elzeki of Henley & Partners describes the goal in the release as ensuring "that no single government holds the whole of a family's life and capital." As a principle of risk management, that is hard to argue with.
Even the Winners Hedge
The most telling detail in the release is about the country at the top of the table. The UAE scores 85.3, one of the highest results in the framework. Yet the same release reports that Henley & Partners recorded a 41% increase in enquiries from UAE-based individuals between the fourth quarter of 2025 and the first quarter of 2026, and a 29% rise in applications for alternative residence or citizenship over the same period. Most of that demand, it says, comes from expatriates using the UAE as a base rather than planning to leave it.
Dominic Volek of Henley & Partners sums it up in the release: "The UAE story in 2026 is one of diversification and optionality, not an exodus." That is the portfolio logic in its purest form. Even people living in the jurisdiction that scores best want a second door, because a high score today says nothing certain about the next crisis.
Where the Portfolio Idea Breaks
The metaphor also hides three hard limits.
You cannot diversify tax residence. A portfolio of residence permits is not a portfolio of tax homes. Tax residence is decided by the rules of each country, usually by days spent, where your home is and where your life is centred. Holding permits in three countries does not make you tax resident in none of them. It can make you tax resident in the wrong one. The only defence is evidence of where you actually live, which is why the paper trail matters more than any permit.
Every holding needs maintenance. Residence rights come with renewal dates, minimum stays, investment conditions and fees. A permit you never use may lapse, or may not be renewed when you need it. A portfolio that is not maintained is not a portfolio. It is a drawer of expired documents.
The wealthy still live somewhere. Children go to one school. Health care happens in one hospital. A marriage happens in one house. The portfolio language suits capital, which can sit in five places at once. People cannot. The right question is not how many countries you hold rights in, but whether the one you live in is stable enough to build a life in, and whether you have a tested route out if it stops being so.
A Portfolio You Can Actually Hold
Stripped of the branding, a sound version of the idea is modest and practical:
- One real home and one clear tax residence, documented well enough to survive an audit from the country you left.
- At least one backup residence right in a stable jurisdiction, kept current, with its conditions understood. In many cases the most valuable backup is a family member's second citizenship obtained by descent or naturalisation, not a purchased one. See The Two-Passport Family.
- Banking in more than one jurisdiction, so that a single bank's decision or a single country's controls cannot freeze everything.
- Assets spread across legal systems, with an eye on where each one would be taxed and inherited.
- A preference for dull, predictable places. The countries that change their rules least often are rarely the ones in the headlines. The argument is made in Why Boring Jurisdictions Win.
The Henley release is right about the direction. Families with means are spreading their exposure across jurisdictions, and the rule changes of the last few years give them good reason to. But the most reliable evidence of that trend comes from official statistics published months or years later, not from an industry scorecard. Build the portfolio because the risks are real, not because a report says everyone else is doing it.
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