Wealth Migration: After the Count Was Dropped

The Henley Private Wealth Migration Report 2026, without the headline number#

The Henley Private Wealth Migration Report 2026, published by Henley & Partners on 16 June 2026, contains no estimate of how many millionaires changed country in the year it covers. Every edition before it led with exactly that number: a global total of migrating millionaires, ranked by destination and by origin, repeated by wire services and cited across the trade and private-banking press without much qualification. The 2026 edition leads with something structurally different, a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction competitiveness score built on twelve weighted dimensions, and Henley says plainly that the new score is not a count of anyone moving anywhere.

The change in method is not billed by Henley as a correction of a prior mistake, and this dossier does not describe it as one either. Henley's own methodology note frames the shift as a narrowing of ambition, from forecasting flows to describing structural conditions (Henley & Partners, Private Wealth Migration Report 2026, Methodology, 16 June 2026). Whatever the internal framing, the effect for a reader who has followed the series for several years is the same: the single number that anchored a decade of coverage is no longer there.

This is the second Victaura Research dossier to examine the subject. The first, published in May 2026 and revised that September, put the widely circulated figure of 142,000 migrating millionaires in 2025 through a forensic check against its cited sources and found the figure did not survive it (see where the world's wealth is actually moving). Henley has since reached an adjacent position by a different route. Rather than defend the count against the criticism it drew, it has stopped publishing one, and it has dropped New World Wealth, the one-person research firm that supplied the underlying migration estimates for the previous five editions.

None of this means the underlying migration of people and capital stopped happening between one June and the next. It means the number that claimed to measure it has been discontinued by its own publisher, without a retraction notice attached to the earlier editions, and replaced with an instrument built to answer a narrower and different question. What that instrument actually measures, and what it does not, is the subject of the rest of this dossier.

What does the Global Wealth Mobility Framework actually measure?#

The Global Wealth Mobility Framework is Henley's replacement instrument, introduced in the same 16 June 2026 report. It assigns every jurisdiction covered a Wealth Mobility Competitiveness Score out of 100, built from thirty-eight indicators grouped into twelve weighted dimensions: Tax Treatment (18%), Rule of Law and Quality of Life (16%), Investor and HNWI Programs (13%), Naturalization and Permanent Residence (13%), Family Reunification (10%), Geopolitical Stability (9%), Remittance and Capital Mobility (7%), Processing Times (5%), Language and Integration (5%), Climate Resilience (2%), Merit and Talent (1%) and Digital Nomad frameworks (1%) (Henley & Partners, Global Wealth Mobility Framework Methodology, and Millionaire Migration and Wealth Mobility Intelligence, 16 June 2026).

Henley is explicit about what the resulting score is not. The methodology states that it 'is not measuring economic success' and 'should not be interpreted as a measure of actual millionaire inflows, outflows, or migration forecasts' (Henley & Partners, Global Wealth Mobility Framework Methodology, 16 June 2026). That is a narrower claim than the one the same firm made every year until this one. It is worth taking at face value: a structural-competitiveness score and a migration count are different instruments built to answer different questions, and the twelve-dimension score answers neither of the questions that made the old count famous, namely how many people moved in a given year and where they went.

The scores themselves read as a ranking of policy design, not of observed behaviour. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) leads at 85.3, ahead of Singapore at 79.5; a broad cluster of jurisdictions, including Italy at 72.3, Germany at 69.7 and the United Kingdom at 68.3, sits together in the high-60s to low-70s band, within four points of each other despite very different fiscal regimes (Henley & Partners, Private Wealth Migration Report 2026, as reported in a PR Newswire release dated 16 June 2026). The gap between the UAE and the United Kingdom, 17 points, is the product of the framework's twelve weighted dimensions, not an observed difference in relocation. It says nothing, on Henley's own account, about how many British millionaires, if any, actually relocated to the UAE in 2026.

The weighting choices are themselves a claim about what drives relocation decisions, not a neutral tabulation. Tax Treatment and Rule of Law together account for 34 of the 100 points on offer, more than the bottom seven dimensions combined (30 points). A jurisdiction that scores poorly on Digital Nomad frameworks, weighted at 1%, loses almost nothing; one that scores poorly on Tax Treatment loses close to a fifth of the maximum. Reading the ranking without reading the weights risks mistaking Henley's judgment about what matters for a description of what wealthy families actually do.

Why Henley dropped the count#

The pressure behind the change was public, specific, and sustained over almost a year. Dan Neidle of Tax Policy Associates, in an analysis published on 27 July 2025, identified a trailing-digit pattern in the centi-millionaire figures of Henley's prior reports that he put at a 1-in-240,000 chance of arising naturally, and concluded that until an independent audit was carried out the report 'should be treated as marketing material, not evidence' (Tax Policy Associates, 27 July 2025). Henley announced an audit of its report in 2025; as of 16 June 2026, the Tax Justice Network recorded that the firm had not provided any updates about it (Tax Justice Network, press release, 16 June 2026).

The Tax Justice Network pressed the same point from a different angle, publishing a report, The Millionaire Exodus Myth (10 June 2025), which concluded that 'a millionaire exodus did not occur' and that Henley's own figures showed millionaires to be highly immobile, 'with an effective near-0% rate of migration'. On 16 June 2026, the day the new report appeared, the Tax Justice Network published its own account of the change, recording that the new edition acknowledged other studies had found 'departure rates among high earners were modest and concentrated in specific circumstances', that Henley had dropped all mentions of New World Wealth, and that it would no longer be 'producing a precise count of movements that the data does not yet support' (Tax Justice Network, press release, 16 June 2026). The same release described New World Wealth as the one-person research firm that prepared the migration estimates for the past five annual editions.

Henley's own methodology pages contain a further, more granular concession: in explaining why millionaire migration is hard to measure, the report states that 'fiscal domicile, habitual residence, and physical presence do not map onto a single administrative category' and that 'many of those who formally departed continued to spend most of their time in the country' (Henley & Partners, Why Measuring Millionaire Migration Is So Difficult, 16 June 2026). This dossier quotes the second sentence as written, in its context of how departures are recorded, and does not extend it beyond that.

None of this is presented as an admission of fabrication, and Henley's own materials do not use that language; the firm's public position is that it has narrowed its method to what its data can support, not that its prior data was invented. What changed is verifiable and narrower than a scandal: a named data supplier is gone, a headline number is gone, and a new instrument carrying an explicit disclaimer has taken its place. Readers drawing a stronger conclusion than that are drawing it themselves, not reading it in the source.

Is anything about wealth migration still measurable?#

Yes, in a small number of places, and in every case the measurement is national administrative data rather than any private index. In the United Kingdom, HMRC's statistical release of 30 July 2026 counted 81,900 non-domiciled and deemed-domiciled taxpayers for the 2024-25 tax year, the last year before the non-domiciled regime's abolition, down 1,200 on the year before. The same release put combined tax and National Insurance liabilities from that population at £13.6 billion, a 9% increase on the previous year (HMRC, Statistics on non-domiciled taxpayers in the UK, 30 July 2026); capital gains tax liabilities rose 58%, which HMRC said was consistent with wider increases in CGT receipts ahead of the changes announced at the Autumn Budget 2024 (as reported by bmmagazine). The government has said it will only be able to publish accurate estimates of departures since the April 2025 reform next year, in 2027, so this series does not yet say how many non-doms have left since the reform, let alone where they went; the fall of 1,200 is a net change in the count, not a tally of departures (as reported by The National, 31 July 2026).

In Italy, the Corte dei Conti's figures, reported in the Italian financial press, put beneficiaries of the Article 24-bis flat-tax regime at 1,923 in 2024, of whom 1,374 were principal taxpayers and 549 family members (QuiFinanza, 26 June 2026; see why Italy attracts international investors). The annual substitute tax charged to new entrants who transfer residence to Italy from 1 January 2026 has risen again, to EUR 300,000 from EUR 200,000, with the per-family-member charge rising from EUR 25,000 to EUR 50,000 (idealista, 15 December 2025). Both figures describe people who opted into a specific, registered fiscal status administered by a named authority. Neither is a count of 'millionaires migrating' in the sense the withdrawn Henley figure implied; both come closer to it than anything the Global Wealth Mobility Framework produces, because both can be checked against a public register.

What the two series share is a limit worth stating as plainly as their existence. HMRC counts non-domiciled tax status, not net worth or nationality of destination, and its own UK-departure data will not exist in usable form until 2027. The Corte dei Conti counts 24-bis elections, not the wider Italian inbound population, and the Corte itself has noted that the amount of beneficiaries' foreign income is not known, which makes the ordinary tax forgone impossible to calculate and limits what even this cleanest available series can say about net fiscal effect (QuiFinanza, 26 June 2026). Measurable is not the same as complete.

No published source, from either authority, counts how many people left the United Kingdom for Italy specifically, or for any other single named destination, in 2025 or 2026. That corridor-level gap, already noted in this dossier's first volume, has not closed in the four months since; it has simply stopped being filled by a Henley number that was not standing on the ground it claimed.

Who built the Global Wealth Mobility Framework, and does that matter?#

Henley & Partners describes itself, in the press release for this report, as 'the global leader in residence and citizenship planning' (Henley & Partners, press release, 16 June 2026). That is not incidental background; it is the whole of its public business, and it is the same firm that designed, weighted and scored the Global Wealth Mobility Framework. The firm that advises on and markets golden-visa, investor-residence and naturalization programmes is also the firm that decided how much weight 'Investor and HNWI Programs' (13%) and 'Tax Treatment' (18%) should carry in a jurisdiction's competitiveness score, out of the 100 points on offer.

This does not make the twelve dimensions arbitrary, and it does not make the underlying indicators invented; Henley states that its findings are 'benchmarked against data from organizations including the World Bank, IMF, OECD, and Global Peace Index' and cross-checked against its own proprietary enquiry and application trends (Henley & Partners, press release, 16 June 2026), and this dossier has no basis to dispute the public-data component. It does mean the score is directional in a specific sense the word usually understates: it is a competitiveness ranking published by a firm whose commercial interest runs through exactly the categories of programme that several of the highest-weighted dimensions reward. A reader can use the score as a structured summary of one advisory firm's view of policy design. Using it as an independent verdict on where wealth is actually moving asks an instrument to do work its own methodology page says it cannot do.

The distinction matters for how the score should travel once it leaves Henley's own pages. A rule-of-law index published by the World Justice Project, or a climate-readiness index published by the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative, carries no comparable commercial interest in the ordering of the jurisdictions it ranks. The Global Wealth Mobility Framework does, structurally, by the nature of the firm that built it. Neither fact makes the framework worthless for the narrower purpose it now claims for itself. Both facts belong in the same sentence whenever the 85.3, the 72.3 or the 68.3 is cited as if it settled a question about capital flows.

Why the old numbers keep circulating#

The 142,000 figure was a Henley projection for calendar 2025, published on 24 June 2025 and carried, largely without qualification, across global wire and trade coverage; a Fortune headline from 8 August 2025 is typical of how it travelled (Fortune, 8 August 2025). It predates the 16 June 2026 report and the framework that replaced it by almost exactly a year. It was never republished with a correction attached, and it was never the subject of a formal retraction notice from Henley; it was simply not repeated in the following year's edition, and a new instrument took its place instead.

A number that is silently dropped by its publisher does not disappear from the index of the open web on the same day. In the course of researching this dossier in September 2026, search results, aggregator pieces and secondary commentary carrying the 142,000 figure, and the migration narrative built around it, remained live and easily retrievable, months after the firm that produced the number had moved on to a different instrument entirely. Nothing in Henley's 2026 materials asks search engines, generative-AI summarisers or the trade outlets that carried the figure to update their coverage, and nothing obliges any of them to.

The practical asymmetry favours the old, precise-sounding, contested number over the new, disclaimed, imprecise one. A twelve-dimension competitiveness score with an explicit disclaimer attached is a harder thing to compress into a single retrievable claim than '142,000 millionaires are leaving'. Search summaries and generative systems tend to reward exactly the kind of crisp, quotable figure that Henley has just stopped producing, and tend to have little mechanism for surfacing a footnote that says a prior number has been quietly discontinued. The count Henley withdrew is, in that narrow and mechanical sense, more durable online in September 2026 than the framework built to replace it.

A further, independently sourced data point shows how narrow the old headline's base was. The Tax Justice Network reported that the Henley report's author stated in a BBC interview that the group of UK 'millionaires' as defined in the report totalled 602,000, 'around one fifth of the UK's millionaire population' reported in the UBS Global Wealth Report 2024 (Tax Justice Network, Millionaire exodus did not occur, study reveals). The same review concluded that Henley's own figures implied 'an effective near-0% rate of migration' (Tax Justice Network, The Millionaire Exodus Myth, 10 June 2025). A headline count built on a narrowly defined population was always a weaker instrument than its wide circulation suggested.

What should the allocator do with a directional score?#

Treat the Global Wealth Mobility Framework as an input on policy design, not as a signal of capital flow. Where it agrees with an independently checkable national series, such as Italy's registered count of 24-bis beneficiaries, it corroborates something already visible elsewhere. Where it stands alone, unconfirmed by any national series, it is one advisory firm's weighted opinion about which structural features matter most, expressed on a hundred-point scale that resembles precision without offering it.

The correct sequence is to read the fiscal and administrative record first, and the competitiveness score second, as context rather than as evidence in its own right. That is the same discipline this dossier applies to allocation questions elsewhere (see family offices and the 2026 allocation shift). A jurisdiction's position on a privately built framework is not, on its own, a reason to move capital, staff or residence toward it, however wide the gap between its score and a neighbour's looks on the page.

Where a principal genuinely needs a migration count at corridor level, for the UK-to-Italy movement or any other single named corridor covered in the trade press, none currently exists at a granularity that would make it decision-useful. The honest position is to say so, price the resulting uncertainty explicitly in any planning that depends on it, and rely on the administrative series that do exist, thin and partial as they are, in preference to any index that claims to have solved the measurement problem simply by changing what it measures.

The weak points, honestly disclosed#

This dossier's own limits should be stated with the same candour it asks of Henley's. The Global Wealth Mobility Framework's thirty-eight indicators and their exact scoring inputs are not published in a form this dossier could independently re-derive; the dimension weights and the headline scores used here are taken from Henley's own methodology pages and from press materials reporting them, not recomputed from primary data this dossier obtained itself. A framework introduced in June 2026, with its first edition, also has no history yet against which to check whether its scores correlate with any later-confirmed measure of actual relocation; Henley states it has been validated against its own enquiry and application pipeline, which is not an independent measure (Henley & Partners, Why Measuring Millionaire Migration Is So Difficult, 16 June 2026).

The measurable series cited above are themselves partial, and citing them as an alternative to Henley's withdrawn count is not a claim that they solve the underlying problem. HMRC's non-domiciled count answers a tax-status question, not a wealth or migration-destination question, and its post-reform departure data will not exist before 2027 on the government's own timeline. The Corte dei Conti's 24-bis figures cover one Italian regime, not Italy's wider inbound population, and carry the Corte's own acknowledgement that the amount of beneficiaries' foreign income is not known, so the ordinary tax forgone cannot be calculated. Neither series supports a claim about where the marginal globally mobile household is actually relocating in 2026; both only support a narrower claim about who has opted into one specific, named status.

The observation above, that the withdrawn 142,000 figure remained easily retrievable online months after Henley stopped publishing it, is drawn from this dossier's own research process in September 2026. It is not drawn from a published study measuring search or generative-AI citation behaviour at scale, because this dossier could not locate one. It is reported here as a directional, first-hand observation, at the grade this dossier applies to unverifiable claims generally, and it should be read with that limit attached rather than as a quantified finding.

Skin in the game disclosure. Victaura, through its parent Greystone B.V. (Netherlands), develops projects on Lake Como (Italy), in Nungwi, Zanzibar (Tanzania), on Gili Air and in Uluwatu, Bali (Indonesia), and holds an off-plan capital position on Al Marjan Island, Ras Al Khaimah (UAE). Readers should assume commentary may be influenced by, or benefit, these positions. This document is classified as marketing material under MiFID II Article 24(3). It is not investment advice.