Britain is home to an estimated 442,000 sterling millionaires, down from a peak of 1.07 million in 2021 and the lowest count since the 2008 financial crisis. That is a fall of roughly 59% in four years, on the Adam Smith Institute’s tracker, updated on July 28.
Declines in each of the last four years produced that drop, with the 2025 figure sitting 7% below 2024. The count first passed one million in 2020 and peaked the following year.
A constant-price sterling millionaire, on the think tank’s definition, is an adult British resident with at least £1 million (approximately US$1.33 million) in individual net worth. Net worth here spans all real and financial asset classes, pensions and property included, in constant 2025 prices.
“Driven by a Number of Factors”
Higher interest rates and weak confidence in the British economy have cut the inflation-adjusted value of pension pots and high-end London property, an effect the institute describes as mechanical. Low household savings have slowed the pace at which households reach the threshold.
Emigration is the third factor the release names, pointing to what it calls a well-documented trend of wealthy residents leaving Britain or declining to move there. Departures are attributed to the end of non-dom tax status, high general taxation, and a culture the release calls hostile to wealth creators.
The non-domiciled regime closed in April 2025, replaced for new arrivals by a four-year foreign income and gains regime. Britain has offered no dedicated investor route since the Home Office shut the Tier 1 (Investor) visa in February 2022.
“Calls for a Wealth Tax Are Particularly Misguided”
Abolishing inheritance tax and phasing out capital gains tax head the institute’s list of demands, alongside an international competitiveness assessment of how Britain treats non-doms and high-net-worth individuals. Against a wealth tax it cites France, Austria, and the Netherlands, all of which abandoned theirs after outflows or avoidance behavior.
Mitchell Palmer, an economist at the institute, said the decline “may be greeted as a success by some on the Left” but should be read as a warning signal instead. James Quarmby, a partner at Stephenson Harwood, noted that individuals find it “very easy” to move themselves, their money, and their businesses elsewhere.
Andrew Griffith, the shadow business and trade secretary, and Robert Jenrick, whom Reform UK bills as its shadow chancellor, also supplied comments. Separately, the release states that the top 1% of earners account for 29.1% of income tax. No Treasury response appears in it.
“Make the Tax Environment More Welcoming to Wealth Creators”
Keir Starmer announced his resignation on June 22 and stayed on as caretaker until the handover. Andy Burnham was formalized as prime minister on July 20, and named John Healey chancellor of the exchequer the same evening.
Healey had quit as defense secretary in June over the pace of military spending increases, and he is the sixth chancellor since the start of 2022. The non-dom abolition the institute cites took effect under his predecessor, Rachel Reeves.
Labour’s 2024 manifesto pledge on the main rates of income tax, VAT, and employee national insurance contributions still binds, and Burnham has committed to it. Wealth taxes are not an immediate priority, he has signaled, without ruling one out. Burnham has not proposed one, according to the Chartered Institute of Taxation.
Under normal circumstances, a chancellor must give the Office for Budget Responsibility at least 10 weeks’ notice of a fiscal event, and Parliament is in summer recess. That puts the first Healey Budget in the autumn at the earliest.
A 20% settling-up charge on unrealized gains from UK business assets was reported before the November 2025 Budget and did not appear in it. David Lesperance, managing director of Lesperance & Associates, said that “everyone is waiting for the shoe to drop on the proposed tax policy of the new PM and Chancellor.”
On his reading, the difficulty of implementing a wealth tax leaves wealthy entrepreneurs braced for “dramatic increases in capital gains tax and/or an exit tax.” He expects many to depart “in the months between the Autumn Statement and the April year-end,” and said the number leaving “will explode in the future.”
Two measures affecting wealthy residents are already under way without any input from the new chancellor. A consultation on the High Value Council Tax Surcharge closed on July 14, and the government has not published an outcome. From April 2028, owners rather than occupiers of English homes worth £2 million or more would pay £2,500 a year, rising to £7,500 above £5 million.
November’s command paper on the settlement overhaul is the other, setting a 10-year baseline for indefinite leave to remain. That baseline falls by seven years for anyone with taxable income above £125,140 in the three years before applying. Consultation closed on February 12, and no rules have been laid.
A £5 million (approximately US$6.7 million) invite-only investor visa reached private wealth advisers in May, through a unit housed under 10 Downing Street. It went before a wider Cabinet Office audience on June 10, where the Treasury and the Home Office proved unconvinced and one official said the plan was going nowhere. Peter Kyle championed it inside government, and Burnham removed him as business secretary on July 20.
“The Figure Has to Be Estimated”
Britain keeps no current register of personal wealth, so the millionaire count is modeled rather than counted. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) runs its Wealth and Assets Survey only every two years, and the tax system records income rather than assets.
Total UK household net worth in the ONS National Accounts, about £10.75 trillion in 2024, is the starting point. A Pareto distribution then estimates how many people sit above the £1 million line, using a single parameter, alpha, of approximately 2.919, fitted across all nine survey waves at once.
Fitted wave by wave, that parameter ranges from roughly 2.6 to 3.2, and by the institute’s own account the constant approximates a shifting distribution. Because the parameter stays fixed, movement from year to year comes from the national accounts figures rather than from the survey.
Its method therefore tracks year-to-year change more reliably than the absolute level, which the institute calls uncertain, partly because the two datasets are defined differently. The Office for Statistics Regulation withdrew the survey’s accreditation in June 2025, finding the figures “no longer of sufficient value or quality to meet users’ needs.” That judgment bears on the estimated level rather than the direction of travel.
Aggregate household net worth, on the national accounts measure, fell 19% in real terms between 2021 and 2023, on Resolution Foundation analysis cited by the House of Commons Library. Rising interest rates, high inflation, and falling asset values drove that decline.
Pension wealth accounts for 35% of household wealth, and the ONS has changed how it measures it, breaking that time series. The Institute for Fiscal Studies called the change a mistake that made “an already flawed methodology substantially worse.”
Survey data put the scale differently: The ONS found 14% of households in Great Britain above £1 million in total wealth in April 2020 to March 2022. That count covers households rather than individual adults, and it predates the period the institute describes.
Lesperance said many in the UK are “‘millionaires’ simply because their home values have increased.” He noted that “the more interesting number would be the increase/decrease in those worth £10 million, £100 million, or £1 billion.” Citing his own dealings with departing ultra-high-net-worth non-doms and the absence of a Tier 1 replacement, he said he “would guess that the numbers would show a staggering loss.”
The tracker also produces a nominal US dollar count matching the definition UBS uses in its Global Wealth Report. At 442,000, the real-terms sterling measure is the more conservative of the two.
What This Means
These demands land on a chancellor eight days into the job, with no Budget date and a commitment not to touch the three largest personal tax rates. Advisers including Grant Thornton read those commitments as pointing toward the taxation of assets, land, and capital gains.
That four-year figure is the one that will travel, and the composition behind it decides whether it means what it appears to mean. Roughly 628,000 fewer people cleared a fixed real threshold across a period when aggregate real household wealth fell 19%.
For anyone advising British-resident clients, the calendar matters more than either number. No Budget arrives before the autumn, the surcharge consultation has closed without a response, and the investor visa has lost its champion in cabinet.
