Executive Summary: Millionaires are no longer choosing Canada. The Henley Private Wealth Migration Report 2025 shows Canada’s net millionaire inflow collapsed 69% to roughly 1,000, dropping it out of the world’s “Safe 8” wealth havens. The wealth flowed the other way: the UAE led every destination with a record 9,800 net arrivals, and Dubai’s millionaire population has doubled in a decade to around 81,200. The push is tax and a record 120,640 emigrants; the pull is Dubai.
For most of the last decade, Canada didn’t have a wealth problem. It had the opposite. Rich people moved here, and that steady inflow was treated as one of the quieter, more dependable parts of the national economic story.
That has now reversed, and sharply. The millionaires who used to pick Canada are increasingly picking somewhere else, and more often than not that somewhere is Dubai. At the same time, ordinary Canadians are leaving the country at a pace nobody alive has seen. Both trends point at the same underlying pressure, and both are showing up clearly in the 2025 and 2026 data.
Millionaires Have Stopped Choosing Canada
The clearest signal comes from the Henley Private Wealth Migration Report 2025, published by Henley & Partners using tracking data from New World Wealth. It measures the net flow of dollar millionaires relocating internationally, and Canada’s number fell off a cliff.
Analysis of the Henley and New World Wealth data by Better Dwelling shows Canada’s net inflow of migrating millionaires fell 69% in 2025 to roughly 1,000, its weakest showing on record outside the pandemic years, even as global millionaire migration was surging to a new high.
That drop was steep enough to knock Canada out of what Henley and New World Wealth call the “Safe 8,” the eight countries considered the world’s safest, most consistent wealth magnets: currently Switzerland, Singapore, the UAE, Australia, Malta, Mauritius, Monaco, and New Zealand. Canada had held a top-three spot in that group for most of the past decade. In 2025 it fell to 9th, dropping out entirely.
The wealth that once came to Canada hasn’t disappeared. It is simply choosing other places, and one destination is pulling far ahead of the rest.
Where the Wealth Is Going: Dubai Leads the World
Globally, an estimated 142,000 millionaires were projected to relocate in 2025, according to Henley, a record. The single biggest winner was the UAE, which led every destination on the planet with a net inflow of 9,800 relocating millionaires, more than 2,000 ahead of the United States in second place.
Dubai sits at the centre of that story. The city’s resident-millionaire population has roughly doubled over the past decade, reaching an estimated 81,200 millionaires, 237 centimillionaires, and 20 billionaires, according to New World Wealth data. That growth is what turns a tax decision into a community decision. Wealthy movers arriving in Dubai now find an established network of peers, advisers, and entrepreneurs already in place rather than a cold start.
For Canadians specifically, Dubai has become an increasingly deliberate choice, particularly for founders and business owners who want to restructure how and where they operate entirely, rather than simply take a higher-paying job elsewhere.
We’ve covered one such case directly. A Toronto-based founder running a 100-person company was paying roughly $1.5 million a year in Canadian taxes before relocating his entire operation to Dubai in under three weeks, a decision he says paid for itself almost immediately. It isn’t an isolated story either. We’ve documented a founder who left Canada and rebuilt her business in Dubai in 90 days, and set out the full process in our guide to moving to Dubai from Canada.
This is also our own story. GenZone’s co-founders, Kevin McKenzie and Shayan Nasiri, are both Canadians, University of Ottawa graduates who left the country for exactly the reasons in this article. Kevin, who had worked in wealth management and at the Canada Revenue Agency, understood the tax maths better than most and moved to Dubai in 2022; Shayan made the same move, and together they built GenZone to help other founders do it properly. The wider story of that move is set out in this profile of how two Canadians built GenZone from Canada to Dubai.
Why Are Wealthy Canadians Leaving in the First Place?
Ask the people actually making the decision, and the same handful of reasons keep coming up. Almost all of them come back to tax and take-home income.
A Tax System That Bites Earlier Than America’s
Canada’s top federal tax rate applies at about $258,000 of income in 2026. In the US, that threshold sits far higher depending on the state, at roughly $1 million in California and around $25 million in New York City before the top marginal rate kicks in.
A TD Economics report titled “Canada’s Silent Brain Drain” pointed out that even after accounting for higher US healthcare costs, the after-tax gap for high earners is large enough to be hard to ignore over an entire career, particularly for founders and professionals whose income is uncapped.
For a fuller side-by-side on day-to-day costs, we compare the two directly in our guide to the cost of living in Dubai versus Toronto.
An Exit Tax on the Way Out
Canada also taxes people for leaving. It’s known as the deemed disposition rule. When a Canadian resident ceases to be a tax resident, the Canada Revenue Agency treats it as though they sold all their assets at fair market value on the way out the door, even if nothing was actually sold, and taxes the resulting capital gains accordingly.
We’ve written a full breakdown of how that mechanism works, including the widely circulated (and unconfirmed) rumour of an additional flat departure fee, in our guide to Canada’s exit tax.
The important consequence: because the tax applies to unrealized gains at the moment of departure, it tends to push wealthy Canadians toward planning their exit earlier, while their asset base is smaller, rather than later. For many founders, that turns “should I leave” into “when should I leave,” and the answer is usually sooner.
Cost of Living and Public Services
Housing affordability, strained healthcare capacity, and a broader sense of paying more for less have become recurring themes in why mobile, high-earning Canadians say they’re weighing a move. None of these are new complaints in Canadian life. What’s changed is how many people with the means to act on them are actually doing so.
The Bigger Picture: Ordinary Canadians Are Leaving Too
The millionaire story sits inside a much larger one. It isn’t only the wealthy heading for the exit. Everyday Canadians are emigrating at a record pace, which is why the wealth data lands as part of a pattern rather than a standalone headline.
According to Statistics Canada’s quarterly international migration estimates (Table 17-10-0040-01), 120,640 people emigrated from Canada in 2025. That is the highest annual figure in a dataset stretching back to 1952, beating the record set just one year earlier, when 118,409 people left in 2024.
Net emigration, which subtracts people who come back from the total who leave, hit an all-time high of 65,706 in 2025, breaking a record that had stood since 1997. The first quarter of 2026 kept climbing, with 30,092 departures, the highest first-quarter figure ever recorded and the fourth straight year of Q1 increases.
Roughly 467,000 citizens and permanent residents emigrated across the four years from 2022 through 2025. The departures aren’t evenly spread: Ontario accounted for 56,266 emigrants in 2025, nearly half the national total, despite holding only about 39% of the population.
Read alongside the millionaire numbers, the message is consistent. A country that was once dependable at both keeping its people and attracting wealth is now doing measurably worse at both.
A Necessary Caveat
Reports like Henley’s have real critics, and giving them a hearing makes the picture more credible, not less. The Tax Justice Network has argued that Henley’s global “record exodus” framing overstates the numbers, noting that even 142,000 relocating millionaires is a small fraction of the world’s roughly 60 million-strong millionaire population, and that Henley’s estimates rely on a modeled methodology rather than a hard count.
That critique is fair applied to the global narrative. It doesn’t change the Canada-specific picture, though. A 69% collapse in millionaire inflow, a drop out of the Safe 8, and a StatsCan emigration record set in the same twelve months are three independently sourced data points lining up in the same direction, which is a harder signal to dismiss than a single dramatic headline.
Canada Tried to Reverse Course, and the Numbers Kept Climbing Anyway
This part matters, because it complicates the simplest version of the tax story. Canada’s 2024 federal budget proposed raising the capital gains inclusion rate from 50% to 66.67%, a change that would have hit entrepreneurs and investors hardest.
The measure was deferred in January 2025, then fully cancelled by Prime Minister Mark Carney on March 21, 2025, specifically to, in the government’s own words, “catalyze investment” and keep builders and entrepreneurs in the country.
That cancellation was, in effect, Canada trying to head off exactly the kind of wealth flight this article describes. It happened months before the 2025 emigration and millionaire numbers came in, and they kept climbing regardless.
That timing suggests the pressures pushing high earners out run deeper than any single tax measure. It points to a broader, structural comparison of opportunity, take-home income, and quality of life that one reversed budget line was never going to fix on its own.
Why Dubai Specifically Appeals to Canadian Founders
For the Canadians who choose Dubai, the reasons are consistent with what’s pulling wealth there globally. Our full guide for Canadians relocating to Dubai walks through the residency, company, and tax steps in order, but the core appeal comes down to four things.
Tax. No personal income tax, no capital gains tax, and no wealth tax, paired with a 9% federal corporate tax that includes relief for smaller businesses. For a founder comparing take-home income against Canada’s roughly 258k top-bracket threshold, the gap compounds quickly.
Independent residency. The Golden Visa and company-formation-linked routes offer long-term UAE residency that isn’t tied to an employer, which matters for founders relocating an active business rather than taking a job.
An established community. With over 80,000 resident millionaires and a fast-growing entrepreneurial base already in place, relocating founders arrive to an existing network of peers and advisers rather than a cold start.
Business infrastructure. Dubai’s free zone company structures are built specifically for founders setting up and operating quickly, which matters far more to someone relocating a functioning business than to an individual simply changing tax residency.
Is This a “Grass Is Greener” Situation?
Honesty is more useful here than a sales pitch. Dubai is not the automatic right answer for every Canadian weighing a move.
Cultural adjustment. The UAE is genuinely cosmopolitan, but newcomers should arrive informed of and respectful toward local norms and expectations.
Cost of living. The tax savings are real, but Dubai is not a cheap city to live in at a comparable standard, and housing especially can carry a real premium.
It’s a relocation, not a shortcut. Moving a life and a business across borders is a genuine undertaking. Structuring the move in the right order, entity formation, banking, tax residency, and compliance, is what separates a clean transition from an expensive one.
Summary
The direction of travel is hard to argue with. Millionaires have stopped choosing Canada, the country has fallen out of the world’s Safe 8 for the first time in over a decade, and the wealth that once came here is increasingly going elsewhere. More than anywhere else on earth, that elsewhere is the UAE, with Dubai as its centre of gravity and a resident-millionaire population that has doubled in ten years.
For the individual founder or high earner, the calculation is personal, and there’s no universal answer. But the tax pressure pushing wealth out of Canada isn’t reversing, the exit tax rewards moving sooner rather than later, and for a growing number of Canadians restructuring their business around a UAE entity, Dubai is where that decision is landing.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where do Canadian millionaires move to?
The UAE is the world’s leading destination for migrating millionaires, with a record net inflow of 9,800 in 2025, and Dubai in particular has become an increasingly common choice for Canadian founders and business owners relocating an entire operation rather than taking a job elsewhere.
Why are wealthy Canadians leaving?
The most commonly cited drivers are a tax system that reaches its top marginal rate at a much lower income threshold than the US, an exit tax on departure, and a widening cost of living and public services gap.
Does Canada have an exit tax?
Yes. Canada’s deemed disposition rule treats departing tax residents as if they sold all their assets at fair market value on the day they leave, taxing the resulting unrealized capital gains, even though nothing was actually sold.
How many people left Canada in 2025? Statistics Canada recorded 120,640 emigrants in 2025, the highest annual total since the agency’s records began in 1952, and net emigration hit an all-time high of 65,706.
Why is Dubai so appealing to Canadian founders? No personal income tax, capital gains tax, or wealth tax; long-term residency through the Golden Visa that isn’t tied to employment; an established community of tens of thousands of resident millionaires; and free zones built to get a relocating business running quickly.
Are millionaires actually leaving Canada?
Canada’s net inflow of migrating millionaires fell 69% in 2025 to roughly 1,000, according to analysis of Henley & Partners and New World Wealth data, its weakest showing on record outside the pandemic, and enough to knock Canada out of the world’s top eight wealth-haven destinations for the first time in over a decade.
Sources: Henley Private Wealth Migration Report 2025 (Henley & Partners and New World Wealth); Better Dwelling analysis of Henley and New World Wealth data; New World Wealth resident-millionaire data; Statistics Canada, Table 17-10-0040-01, Estimates of the components of international migration, quarterly (release date June 17, 2026); TD Economics, “Canada’s Silent Brain Drain” (May 2026); Prime Minister of Canada, Office announcement, March 21, 2025. This article is general information, not tax or immigration advice. Individual outcomes depend on your circumstances, and tax rules change. Speak with a qualified adviser before making relocation decisions.
