A decade of departures: Moscow only city with worse millionaire exodus than London
If Knight Frank’s inaugural Global Cities survey was anything to go by, London had the world at its feet in 2013.
Respondents to the property giant’s annual poll of global wealth advisers declared the UK capital—not Singapore, Geneva, or any of America’s embarrassment of global cities—the ‘most important city in the world’ to their ultra-high-net-worth clients.
London had leapfrogged New York, which, the paper’s authors said, was lagging behind its UK rival “by some distance” thanks to a combination of its fortunate geographical location, rich cultural offering and centuries-old legal system.
So ascendant was Britain’s capital, that despite the shadow of the financial crash still lingering over Europe’s finance hub, the same paper forecast that London would retain its spot as the super rich’s number one city in 2023. And over the same period, the UK as a whole could expect its billionaire population to go up by 85 per cent.
Over a decade on, evidence of these rose-coloured predictions has come to pass is practically non-existent.
But there is plenty to suggest the opposite has happened.
A new study from wealth advisory Henley & Partners has found that, in the 12-years since Knight Frank published its Global Cities report, only sanction-hit Moscow has lost more ultra-high net worth individuals than London.
The pair of beleaguered capitals were the only two cities in the wide-ranging study to have suffered from a falling number of dollar millionaires since 2014, with the London’s capital declining by 12 per cent compared to the the Russian capital’s 25 per cent.
The drop was enough to take the UK capital out of the annual study’s five ‘wealthiest cities’ in the world for the first time in its four-year history. Los Angeles leapfrogged London to join New York, Los Angeles’ Bay Area, Tokyo and Singapore in the 2025 edition’s top five.
Authors of the World’s Wealthiest Cities report attributed London’s fall to a toxic cocktail of the London Stock Exchange’s dwindling influence, the ascendance of nearby hubs like Dubai and Frankfurt, and, latterly, a succession of damaging policy decisions as weighing on the city’s allure to the global super rich.
The British hub has also, says Andrew Amolis, an analyst at the study’s research partner, New World Wealth, struggled to keep up in the tech arms race.
“The growing dominance of USA and Asia in the global hi-tech space has caused several wealthy tech entrepreneurs in the UK to reconsider their base location,” he tells City AM.
“Many have moved to tech hubs in North America and Europe. Brexit has arguably had an exacerbating effect on this.”
Other structural issues – such as the fact the UK’s capital gains tax and property duties “are among the highest in the world – have also dented London’s ability to lure in well-healed global citizens. It has simultaneously prevented residents from reaching millionaire status, adding to the city’s woes in the manager’s table.
But according to Peter Ferrigno, director of tax at Henley & Partners, it is more recent – and self inflicted – decisions that have especially compounded and accelerate departures. A previous study from Henley & Partners and New World Wealth found that 10,080 millionaires – by which it means residents with over $1m in liquid assets left the UK over the course of 2024.
“I think the effects of the non-dom abolition are already clear in the number of people that left the UK in the past year,” he tells City AM.
The policy’s accompanying changes to inheritance tax (IHT) are also acting as a deterrent to international investors. “The UK has one of the highest IHT rates in the world, and it cuts in at £3255,000 of [an] estate,” Ferrigno says. “Any foreign national in the UK for more than 10 years would then be caught by that, and as all structures to avoid this such as trusts have been caught as well, the only solution is to leave.”
With the UK’s public finances looking stubbornly moribund, and Donald Trump’s swingeing tariffs likely to snuff out any embers of growth, few are predicting the government will find the political bandwidth to unveil the sort of measures that would the tide on the well-documented millionaire exodus.
But if this tale of two cities reports proves anything, it’s that a lot can change in 12 years.