Cross-border wealth planning for UK expats looks different in 2026 than it did eighteen months ago. Two events six thousand miles apart delivered the same lesson this year. In April 2025, Britain abolished the remittance basis that had underpinned non-dom planning for two centuries. Eleven months later, missiles over Dubai’s Jebel Ali port put the Gulf’s reputation as a guaranteed safe haven for wealth to its first real test. Neither event alone should force a family to rewrite its financial strategy. Together, they make an unavoidable case for something advisers have argued for years but rarely had this much evidence to prove: no single jurisdiction, however favourable today, should hold the whole of a family’s wealth, residence and contingency planning.

Two wake-up calls in one year

The UK: from tax exodus to reluctant reappraisal

The abolition of the remittance basis replaced up to fifteen years of non-dom relief with a four-year Foreign Income and Gains regime. New arrivals who have spent at least ten consecutive years outside the UK now get four years of tax-free treatment on foreign income and gains, then face worldwide taxation like any other resident. Henley & Partners’ 2025 Wealth Migration Report had projected that 16,500 high-net-worth individuals would leave the UK during the year, more than double the 7,500 who left in 2024, and the largest single-year wealth outflow ever recorded for any country.

The firm’s newly released 2026 report adds granularity to that picture. Applications from individuals with a UK address rose 15% between 2024 and 2025, and the UK has climbed from Henley’s 20th-largest source market for new clients in 2018 to a consistent top five today. Foreign nationals now make up 53% of all applications originating from UK addresses, meaning British citizens represent almost half of applicants processed by the firm, up from just 8% in 2018.

Set against that, Mishcon de Reya’s private wealth team makes a case that deserves more attention than it gets: the UK’s institutional depth, independent courts and internationally respected legal system remain a genuine asset for HNW families thinking generationally, and the FIG regime, while less generous than the old non-dom rules, is still more favourable than the tax regimes of most competing jurisdictions for a defined four-year window. The exclusion from UK inheritance tax on non-UK assets during the first ten years of residence also opens a nine-year planning window that is easy to overlook amid the exodus headlines.

The lesson isn’t that every UK expat should leave, or that every returning expat should stay. It’s that the planning assumptions that held for the previous two centuries no longer apply automatically, and every UK-connected structure needs re-modelling against the current rules rather than the ones a client’s adviser learned twenty years ago.

The Gulf: when “safe haven” stops being safe

Dubai’s pitch to the wealthy has worked for over a decade: zero income tax, physical safety, and a lifestyle few jurisdictions can match. The emirate’s millionaire population has roughly doubled since 2014 to more than 81,000, including 237 centi-millionaires and at least 20 billionaires. An estimated 9,800 millionaires arrived in 2025 alone, bringing $63 billion in wealth, more than any other country recorded that year.

Then, in late February 2026, the United States and Israel launched military action against Iran, and within days the conflict reached the Gulf states hosting US forces, including the UAE itself. Strikes were reported near Dubai’s Jebel Ali port and a residential tower in Creek Harbour; Dubai International Airport was briefly closed. A ceasefire from early April has held, unevenly, with further flare-ups in May.

The wealth response was immediate and instructive. Reuters reported that wealthy Asian families, many of them Chinese, began moving Dubai-parked assets to Singapore and Hong Kong within days of the first strikes; one Singapore-based private wealth lawyer said several of his Dubai clients, each holding roughly $50 million, contacted him within a single week, three planning immediate transfers. Around 240,000 British nationals live in the UAE, and some households have relocated temporarily to Switzerland, Spain and Portugal while schools in the Emirates shifted to remote learning.

None of this means the UAE’s underlying advantages evaporated. Henley & Partners’ 2026 competitiveness framework still scores the UAE 85.3 out of 100, among the highest of any jurisdiction assessed, reflecting its enduring strength on tax, connectivity and investor access. But the same report records a 41% jump in enquiries from UAE-based individuals about alternative residence options between the final quarter of 2025 and the first quarter of 2026, and a 29% rise in actual applications. The read from Henley’s own team is not that families are abandoning the Gulf, but that they are actively building contingency options alongside it.

The takeaway for anyone whose wealth, residence or business sits primarily in one jurisdiction, however well-run: even the most reliable-looking base can face a shock that limits access to assets, mobility or safety within days, not years.

The sovereign portfolio framework

Henley & Partners used its 2026 report to formalise a shift in how the industry thinks about wealth mobility, moving the central question from where wealth is migrating to, toward why it moves and which jurisdictions are structurally resilient enough to hold it. Its new Global Wealth Mobility Framework scores jurisdictions across a dozen weighted dimensions, from tax treatment and rule of law to geopolitical stability and capital mobility, benchmarked against World Bank, IMF and OECD data.

Singapore leads the 2026 rankings with a score of 79.5, followed by New Zealand at 75.8. Hong Kong sits at 71.2, described in the report as regaining momentum on family office activity and investor migration. The UK, at 68.3, is classified among “competitive jurisdictions under pressure” alongside Germany, Norway, France and South Korea.

As AlphaGeo’s Dr Parag Khanna put it in the report, the wealthy individual of 2026 is no longer selecting a single country; they are “constructing a portfolio of jurisdictions,” spreading exposure across governance systems and geopolitical zones to protect against shocks that no single forecast can anticipate.

For UK expats already living across Hong Kong, Singapore and the UAE, this isn’t an abstract exercise. It’s a description of the life many of Carey Suen’s clients are already leading, whether or not they have structured it deliberately.

Why jurisdictional diversification matters more than any single relocation decision

Asset location is not the same as asset allocation

Most HNW portfolios are already diversified by asset class: equities, bonds, private credit, property. Far fewer are diversified by jurisdiction, the legal system in which those assets are actually held. Where an account, a company or a piece of real estate sits determines its exposure to estate and inheritance tax rules, including, for some, US situs asset rules for non-residents, political and regulatory risk, creditor protection, and access to functioning banking systems if a crisis hits. Forced heirship rules in some jurisdictions, and their absence in others, can override even a carefully drafted will if the underlying assets sit in the wrong place.

Diversification has to be built transparently

Spreading assets across jurisdictions is not a route to avoiding scrutiny; it is closer to the opposite. Most financial centres, including all of Carey Suen’s core markets, participate in the Common Reporting Standard, and US persons carry FATCA obligations wherever they live. Beneficial ownership registers and anti-money laundering rules mean that offshore structuring without full disclosure carries real penalties and reputational risk. A sovereign portfolio has to be built with a compliance-first structure from day one, not retrofitted once regulators come asking.

Stability outranks generosity

Mishcon de Reya’s private wealth team makes a point worth repeating to any client tempted to chase the lowest headline tax rate: for internationally mobile families, consistent rules are worth more than preferential ones. A jurisdiction with independent courts, parliamentary scrutiny and a multi-century legal track record offers a different kind of security than one offering a better rate today that could change by decree tomorrow. That isn’t an argument for any one country. It’s an argument for weighing predictability as heavily as headline tax treatment when deciding where wealth, and family members, actually sit.

What this means if you’re a UK expat in Hong Kong, Singapore or the UAE

This is where cross-border wealth planning for UK expats gets practical. A handful of questions are worth running through with an adviser this year, regardless of how settled your current structure feels.

Residency and timing. If you’ve arrived in the UK, or are planning to, model your position under the FIG regime’s four-year window and the ten-year inheritance tax tail properly, rather than assuming your old non-dom plan still holds.

Concentration risk. If the majority of your investable wealth, business interests and family residence sit in a single jurisdiction, ask what would happen to your liquidity and your family’s mobility if that jurisdiction faced a sudden shock, whatever probability you’d assign to that today.

Succession structuring across borders. A will drafted for one jurisdiction rarely travels cleanly. Forced heirship regimes, UAE succession reforms for non-Muslims, and UK domicile rules for trusts can all pull in different directions depending on where the underlying assets are held.

Currency and banking spread. Holding assets in one currency while spending in another compounds every other risk on this list. Align long-term holdings with where you actually expect to spend, not just where your salary currently lands.

Contingency, not panic. None of this means reacting to headlines. It means having a plan that already accounts for the range of outcomes, rather than building one only after the first shock.

Building your own sovereign portfolio

The families managing this best in 2026 aren’t the ones abandoning the UK, or leaving the Gulf, or piling into whichever jurisdiction scored highest on this year’s index. They’re the ones treating jurisdiction the way they already treat asset class: as one more variable to diversify deliberately, structure transparently, and review regularly rather than inherit by accident.

That takes more than a single conversation about tax residency. It takes an adviser willing to challenge assumptions rather than simply execute them, and a plan built for the family’s full picture, not just this year’s headline rate.

If your wealth, residence or succession planning is still anchored to a single jurisdiction, now is a sensible time to have that conversation. Book a call with Annette Houlihan to review your position.

This article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, tax or legal advice. Carey Suen recommends seeking independent professional advice tailored to your personal circumstances before making any decisions regarding residency, tax structuring or estate planning. Eligibility criteria apply to Carey Suen’s high-net-worth advisory services.