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Since its launch in 2023, the Henley Private Wealth Migration Report has helped shape the global conversation around the movement of high-net-worth individuals and private wealth. Previous editions focused primarily on millionaire inflow and outflow estimates, providing directional insight into an area where official, comparable, and internationally consistent data remains limited.
Those estimates answered an important question: where is wealth moving? They also helped highlight the growing relevance of high-net-worth migration as an economic and policy issue. Internationally mobile investors, entrepreneurs, business owners, and families often bring with them capital, expertise, global networks, philanthropic activity, and commercial opportunity. Their decisions can influence investment flows, innovation, tax revenues, employment, and the long-term competitiveness of cities, regions, and countries.
As the debate around wealth migration has developed, however, it has become increasingly clear that headline migration numbers tell only part of the story. Wealth mobility is rarely driven by a single factor. It reflects a complex interaction of tax policy, legal certainty, residence and citizenship access, capital mobility, geopolitical stability, family considerations, lifestyle preferences, business opportunities, education, safety, and long-term planning objectives.
Annual migration forecasts can provide useful directional signals, but they necessarily capture a moment in time. In a rapidly changing geopolitical, fiscal, and policy environment, such forecasts can be overtaken by events or interpreted outside the context in which they were produced, sometimes becoming attributed to a single policy change, tax increase, or political development when wealth mobility decisions are typically influenced by a far broader combination of factors.
These challenges are compounded by the fact that wealth mobility remains one of the least researched areas of international migration. Unlike broader migration flows, there are few official datasets, there is no globally standardized reporting framework, and there is limited academic literature focused specifically on the movement of high-net-worth individuals and families.
As a result, measuring millionaire migration remains a highly complex undertaking that requires the integration of multiple data sources, methodologies, assumptions, and proxies. Readers interested in these challenges are encouraged to consult the accompanying essay by Dr. Francesco Rampazzo of Oxford and Manchester Universities, ‘Why Measuring Millionaire Migration Is So Difficult’, which explores the methodological complexities and limitations inherent in this emerging field.
In some cases, headline inflow and outflow figures have also been drawn into political narratives or public debate in ways that risk overshadowing the broader wealth, investment, policy, and competitiveness insights the report was designed to illuminate. While such figures provide a useful indicator of wealth mobility trends, they represent only one dimension of a much broader and more complex phenomenon.
The 2026 edition therefore marks a significant evolution in the report’s approach. Rather than publishing a new set of millionaire inflow and outflow forecasts, this year’s report expands the analytical focus from migration outcomes to the structural drivers that shape wealth mobility over time.
At the center of this evolution is the Global Wealth Mobility Framework, a pioneering new analytical model developed by Henley & Partners to assess the structural competitiveness of jurisdictions in the competition for internationally mobile wealth, with analytical modeling, data integration, and technical support from AlphaGeo. The framework does not seek to measure actual millionaire inflows or outflows, nor does it provide future migration forecasts. Instead, it evaluates the conditions that influence wealth mobility decisions and jurisdictional competitiveness.
The framework assesses jurisdictions across 12 weighted dimensions and 38 indicators, including tax treatment, rule of law and quality of life, investor and high-net-worth migration pathways, naturalization and permanent residence routes, family reunification, geopolitical stability, capital mobility, processing efficiency, language and integration requirements, climate resilience, merit and talent pathways, and digital nomad frameworks.
Each jurisdiction receives a Wealth Mobility Competitiveness Score, designed to measure relative structural attractiveness and competitiveness for globally mobile individuals, families, and capital. The score should not be interpreted as a measure of economic success, national prosperity, or actual migration flows. Rather, it is a directional assessment of the factors that influence wealth mobility behavior.
The findings are supported by a combination of public data, policy analysis, Henley & Partners’ proprietary enquiry and application trends, market intelligence, and observed investor migration activity. This allows the report to examine not only which jurisdictions are attracting attention, but why they may be well positioned — or under pressure — in the evolving competition for globally mobile wealth.
This change does not mean that millionaire migration is no longer relevant. On the contrary, the movement of wealthy individuals and families remains an important indicator of broader economic, policy, and geopolitical trends. However, migration is only one expression of a much larger phenomenon.
Increasingly, internationally mobile families are not making simple one-country relocation decisions. They are building ‘sovereign portfolios’ of residence rights, citizenships, investments, business interests, education options, and family access across multiple jurisdictions.
The 2026 report is therefore organized around thematic lenses rather than a single inflow and outflow ranking table. These include jurisdictions demonstrating particularly strong structural positioning for globally mobile wealth; markets where policy, tax, regulatory, or geopolitical developments are influencing wealth mobility dynamics; and strategic jurisdictions offering relevant residence, citizenship, investor migration, and international access opportunities.
This approach is intended to provide a more practical and policy-relevant understanding of global wealth mobility. It recognizes that wealth mobility is not simply about where individuals move, but about how governments compete for capital, talent, entrepreneurship, and globally connected families; how private clients build resilience and optionality across jurisdictions; and how taxation, access, regulation, safety, and institutional quality shape long-term decision-making.
The key question the report now seeks to answer is therefore no longer simply where wealth is moving, but why it is moving — and what makes some jurisdictions more successful than others at attracting, retaining, and supporting globally mobile wealth.
This evolution reflects Henley & Partners’ broader commitment to advancing wealth mobility research through greater analytical depth, transparency, and policy relevance. It also aligns the report more closely with the realities of a fragmented global environment in which internationally mobile wealth is increasingly structured across multiple jurisdictions rather than transferred from one country to another.
As the global leader in residence and citizenship planning, Henley & Partners is best placed to advise you and your family. Contact us for a free consultation.
