Why Britain Is Shedding Millionaires

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Why Britain Is Shedding Millionaires

Blame high taxes and ‘a culture which is hostile to wealth creators.’

By The Editorial Board, WSJ

Aug. 14, 2026 5:24 pm ET

U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham James Manning/PA Wire/ZUMA Press

‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,” remarked the 18th-century English writer Samuel Johnson. In the 21st century, the reason is often that he’s tired of the taxes.

Compared to 2024, Britain has 35,000 fewer residents with an individual net worth of £1 million or more—the fewest since 2008 and a 7% decline in two years, according to a tally by the Adam Smith Institute, a free-market think tank in London. Blame a hostile tax climate and sluggish British economic growth.

Britain imposes a top tax rate of 45% on income above £125,140 (some $170,000) and 24% on capital gains. There’s also a 40% death tax beyond £325,000 on estates. And if wealthy foreigners stick around long enough, they’re penalized for it. The U.K. recently ended provisions that had allowed affluent expatriates to shield their overseas earnings and assets from these levies.

There are bad omens for future tax policy, too. Britain’s new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has declined to rule out a wealth tax, and a newspaper poll this month found 66% of respondents supported one. Leftist economists Gabriel Zucman and Ben Tippet have been promoting a wealth tax of at least 2% on Britain’s most affluent and claim it would raise more than £10 billion a year.

One problem: Britain’s rich can afford to move abroad, and many already have. Switzerland, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Cyprus and Malta have been “falling over themselves to attract the wealthy,” says Douglas McWilliams, founder of the London-based Centre for Economics and Business Research, which does economic forecasting.

Some 27,300 people with a net worth of $1 million or more have moved away from the United Kingdom in 2024 and 2025, according to New World Wealth, a wealth intelligence firm based in Johannesburg, South Africa.

The Adam Smith Institute also finds that Britain is creating fewer home-grown millionaires. The report cites lower household savings, the inflation-based erosion of pension values, a lack of economic confidence that’s reducing property values and “a culture which is hostile to wealth-creators,” among other factors.

High taxes and burdensome British regulations discourage entrepreneurship. Class-based envy and resentment are in the political saddle these days in the U.K., as they are in much of Europe and the U.S.

The Adam Smith Institute says the top 1% of earners already pay 29.1% of British income taxes. A British government report released last month predicts “major sources of pressure on public finances over the next 50 years” as social spending consumes an ever-growing share of GDP. Squeeze the rich hard enough, and they’ll flee, leaving those far less affluent to pick up the tab.