Capgemini says the share of wealthy people changing tax residence dropped from 56% to 25% in a year. Henley says 142,000 millionaires are relocating in 2025, a record. Both are widely quoted. Here is what the gap actually means for private bankers.
Two of the most-cited wealth migration reports in the world currently point in different directions, and almost nobody is pointing it out.
The Financial Times reported this week, citing Capgemini's research, that the share of wealthy people who changed their primary tax residence, or planned to, dropped from 56% in 2024 to 25% in 2025. That is not a small move. It is more than a halving in a single year.
Henley & Partners, in the same period, is forecasting a record 142,000 millionaire relocations for 2025, up from 134,000 the year before, with a projection of 165,000 by 2026. Their number has been rising every year since 2020.
Both figures are widely quoted. Both cannot be telling the same story.
The honest answer is that they are measuring different things, and the gap between them is the real signal.
Henley counts actual relocations and residency applications, the people who finished the process. Capgemini surveyed intent, who says they changed or plan to change. A shrinking intent number alongside a rising completion number suggests something specific: the wave of HNWIs who moved opportunistically during 2022 to 2024, reacting to the UK's non-dom changes, the Credit Suisse collapse, and a string of political shocks, has largely already moved. What is left in the completion numbers is a smaller, more deliberate population whose decisions are structural, not reactive: tax planning, succession, business relocation, not headline panic.
This matters more than it sounds. A banker pricing a 2026 business case off a 2023 mental model of everyone moving everywhere is working from the wrong assumption. The volatile, easy-to-poach segment is mostly gone. What remains is harder to move, harder to win, and considerably more loyal once won.
Seb Sauerborn, who advises HNWIs directly, has gone further and called the Henley methodology itself misleading, arguing the headline figures overstate how mobile this population actually is. Whether or not that critique fully lands, the fact that someone close to the actual clients is pushing back on the most-cited number in the industry is itself worth noting.
Three practical implications, regardless of which report you trust more.
First, the books you are evaluating for portability need a harder look than client moved jurisdiction in the last 18 months. That used to be a reasonable filter. It now risks selecting for the most opportunistic, least loyal segment of your pipeline, the people who left because of a headline, not because of a structural life decision.
Second, the destinations are not evenly attractive anymore. Henley's own data shows the UAE with a net inflow of 9,800 millionaires in 2025, the US at 7,500, and Switzerland among the top five destinations, while the UK posts a historic net outflow of 16,500, more than double China's outflow. If you are weighing a platform move, the booking-centre conversation in 2026 is not whether a jurisdiction is popular, it is whether that jurisdiction is still gaining the specific segment your book belongs to.
Third, banks hiring against speculative inflow numbers are going to be disappointed. If the wealthy who were going to move opportunistically have mostly moved, a 2026 business plan built on continued high-velocity relocation is overoptimistic. The banks asking sharper questions in interviews this year, about real, sticky AUM rather than theoretical pipeline, are the ones reading this correctly.
None of this means migration has stopped. It means the easy phase is over.
What is left is a structurally different, more deliberate population, and the banker who understands that distinction will build a more credible business case than the one still pitching last year's headline.
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[1] Financial Times, June 2026, citing Capgemini Research Institute data on tax residence relocation intent among wealthy individuals. [2] Henley & Partners, Private Wealth Migration Report 2025: 142,000 projected millionaire relocations in 2025, up from 134,000 in 2024, with a forecast of 165,000 by 2026. UK net outflow of 16,500, UAE net inflow of 9,800, USA net inflow of 7,500, China net outflow of 7,800. [3] Seb Sauerborn, "Henley's 2025 Migration Report Is Misleading," October 2025.
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