Headlines about wealthy families and their family offices leaving the UK have appeared regularly since the government abolished the preferential tax regime for non-domiciled residents. It’s a genuine, documented trend — but “family offices are leaving the UK” as a blanket statement overstates what the actual reporting shows. The real picture is more specific, and more mixed, than that framing suggests.
What a family office actually is, for readers unfamiliar with the term
Before assessing what’s happening to them, it’s worth being clear about what a family office actually does, since the term gets used loosely. A family office is a private entity set up to manage the financial and personal affairs of a single wealthy family (or, in a “multi-family” structure, several families) — typically handling investment management, tax and estate planning, philanthropy, and sometimes broader household administration, all under one roof rather than spread across separate external advisers. They range from small operations with a handful of staff to substantial organisations employing dozens of people, and their location matters because it determines which country’s regulatory, tax, and talent environment they operate within day to day — which is exactly why a change to UK tax treatment is the kind of event that can prompt a family office specifically, rather than a broader business, to reconsider its location.
What’s actually been reported
Bloomberg’s ongoing reporting, drawing on UK company registry filings and data from analytics firm With Intelligence, has identified a pattern: family offices tied to some of the world’s largest fortunes are relocating staff and opening branches in other jurisdictions. One Bloomberg analysis found at least 20 individuals from a tracked index of the world’s 500 largest fortunes have UK family office entities, together overseeing more than $450 billion — and identified movement among a subset of these toward other locations.
The specific driver, not a generic trend
This isn’t a vague global shift — it’s tied specifically to one UK policy change: the abolition of the non-domiciled tax status, a process underway since 2024. Family offices connected to non-domiciled individuals are the group actually affected by this specific change, not family offices generally.
Naming the actual scale, not just the headline
This is where precision matters most. A separate Bloomberg analysis, again built on registry filings and With Intelligence data, put real numbers on the total population: of 259 single-family offices based in the UK, managing a combined total of over $340 billion, only 52 are owned by non-domiciled individuals — accounting for roughly $98 billion of that total. And among those 52 non-dom-owned offices, only around 19% (roughly ten offices) were identified as actually departing.
Put plainly: the reported “exodus” describes a specific, non-dom-linked minority of a much larger total UK family office population — not the sector as a whole.
A genuinely important distinction: relocating the person versus relocating the office
Perhaps the most significant nuance in the available reporting: even among the family offices where the underlying wealthy individual has relocated personally, the office itself — its staff, operations, and physical presence — has mostly stayed in London. One specific analysis found that among departing principals, only one office relocated alongside its owner. London’s depth of specialist talent for managing complex, multi-generational wealth appears to be sticky in a way that a single individual’s tax residency isn’t.
Money moving in, alongside money moving out
The same period that’s seen non-dom-linked departures has also seen new family office capital arrive in London, particularly from the Middle East — firms managing substantial fortunes from the UAE and Saudi Arabia have been reported hiring executives and opening premises in London since early 2025. This doesn’t cancel out the departures being reported, but it does complicate any narrative of straightforward, one-directional decline.
That said, this is a genuinely dynamic and mixed picture rather than a settled one in either direction: more recent reporting has also identified specific Gulf-linked firms moving staff away from London toward Dubai, underlining that individual family offices — including ones with Middle Eastern ties — are making differing decisions in both directions, not uniformly arriving or uniformly leaving.
What family offices are actually worried about right now
It’s also worth noting that relocation isn’t the only, or even necessarily the dominant, concern occupying UK family offices at the moment. Citi’s own 2026 Global Family Office Report, based on a survey of 351 family offices conducted in June and July 2026, found that 63% named inflation their top concern — up from 37% in the equivalent 2025 survey, and well ahead of tax policy or relocation. It’s a reminder that a single narrative (in this case, departures) can dominate coverage of a topic without necessarily reflecting what the affected institutions themselves see as their most pressing issue.
Why the internal linking here matters for reading this critically
It’s worth being explicit that most of the specific figures in this piece — the $450 billion, the 259/52/19% breakdown, the individual relocation cases — come from ongoing reporting by a single news organisation, Bloomberg, using registry-filing analysis as its method. That’s a credible, primary-adjacent research approach, not secondhand rumour, but it’s still one organisation’s ongoing investigation rather than an official government or regulatory dataset, and it’s worth reading this analysis with that source concentration in mind rather than treating the figures as definitively settled.
Why non-dom status mattered to this group specifically
It’s worth being clear about why this particular policy change affects family offices in a way that most other UK tax changes wouldn’t. The former non-domiciled status allowed UK residents whose permanent home was legally considered to be outside the UK to avoid UK tax on foreign income and gains not brought into the country — a regime that had made London specifically attractive to internationally mobile wealth for decades, distinct from its appeal as a financial and legal centre in its own right. Its removal changes the tax calculation for exactly the kind of globally mobile, foreign-connected wealth that family offices are built to manage, which is precisely why this group — rather than UK wealth holders generally — is the one visibly responding.
What this does, and doesn’t, tell us
The honest analytical conclusion sits between two extremes. It would be inaccurate to say nothing is happening — a specific, non-dom-linked, and reasonably well-documented pattern of relocation is real and traceable to a clear policy cause. It would be equally inaccurate to describe this as UK family offices broadly abandoning London — the total population of UK-based single-family offices is far larger than the group affected by the non-dom change specifically, the offices themselves often remain in London even when a principal doesn’t, and new capital has continued arriving from elsewhere in the same period. The available evidence supports a narrower, more specific claim than the “exodus” framing implies.
Where else this wealth might actually go
The reporting on this trend consistently points toward a small number of alternative locations, rather than a broad dispersal — most notably Dubai, alongside other jurisdictions including Switzerland, Singapore, and Hong Kong, each offering some combination of favourable tax treatment for internationally mobile wealth and established (or rapidly developing) infrastructure for managing it. This matters for how the trend should be read: it isn’t evidence that London’s fundamental advantages as a base for wealth management have disappeared broadly, so much as evidence that a specific, comparatively narrow tax advantage London used to hold — via the non-dom regime — has been removed, and a small number of competing centres have moved to offer something similar in its place. The two things — London’s general strength as a financial and legal centre, and the specific tax treatment that’s changed — are separable, and conflating them risks overstating the significance of the relocations being reported.
Why this matters beyond the individual cases
Whatever the eventual scale, the pattern is a genuine signal about how sensitive a globally mobile, highly specific segment of wealth holders is to a change in domicile-based tax treatment — worth taking seriously as a policy signal, without needing to inflate it into a broader story the current evidence doesn’t fully support.
Reading this alongside other UK wealth-policy coverage
This piece sits alongside a wider set of tax and wealth-policy changes covered elsewhere on this site, including the business and agricultural property relief changes that took effect the same year. Both stories share an underlying thread worth naming directly: UK tax policy affecting wealth holders has shifted meaningfully across several fronts at once — inheritance tax relief, non-dom status, and reported changes to property investment strategy among them — and family office relocation is best understood as one visible symptom of that broader shift, rather than an isolated phenomenon with its own separate cause.
Sources: Bloomberg — UK Tax Reforms Spur Family Office Scale Back, Bloomberg — London’s Family Offices Drew Mideast Money as Non-Doms Fled, Bloomberg — Saudi Arabia Billionaires’ Family Office Dubai Bet Adds to London Exodus, Citi — 2026 Global Family Office Report, Bloomberg — Inflation Becomes Top Concern for Family Offices, Citi Survey Shows
