For the better part of a decade, Dubai has been the default answer to where wealthy Britons went when home stopped making financial sense.
Zero income tax, year-round sunshine, a frictionless residency pathway and a lifestyle built around aspiration, all at scale – the emirate had refined its pitch to near perfection.
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This has given many pause for thought when the missiles started falling. With the UAE facing ongoing attacks by Iran, Dubai’s carefully curated reputation as a haven for the global elite has begun to erode.
The exodus hasn’t been wholesale, and to say Dubai is “finished” would be reactionary to say the least. But for the first time in years, the city’s allure on mobile UHNW capital looks genuinely negotiable.
Real estate activity has already dropped by 51% since the conflict began, according to Goldman Sachs, suggesting a confidence shock as buyers step back entirely.
Yet wealth still needs a destination; into that vacuum has stepped Milan, a city that’s spent the best part of a decade quietly making itself indispensable.
The tax engine
There are many glaring structural reasons why Italy is now considered the number-one destination for a wealth-led flight-to-safety, least of which is its flat-tax regime.
Article 24-bis of the Italian Tax Code – introduced in 2017 and quietly rebranded “the CR7 rule” after its most famous early beneficiary – was always structurally elegant.
Foreign residents who haven’t paid Italian taxes for nine of the past ten years can pay a single annual fee on all overseas income, with taxation applying only to Italian earnings and local capital gains made within five years of joining the programme.
That annual levy has risen from €100,000 in 2017 to €200,000 in 2024, and now sits at €300,000 at the start of 2026.
That upward creep matters –- and has generated debate in Rome – but for the world’s wealthiest, €300,000 a year on all overseas income remains, as one analyst put it, “small change.”
The regime has even acquired a nickname in financial circles: svuota Londra – “Emptying London.” Roberto Bonomi from law firm Withers notes that Italy is no longer seen as politically unstable: “There was scepticism at first, but over nine years we have proven the system is stable, and clients no longer fear Italy.”
What the conflict in the Gulf has done is accelerate a trend that was already underway. Even before the fighting in Iran, interest in Italy surged after Britain scrapped its non-dom status and Portugal tightened its own rules.
Milan was already the fourth or fifth conversation. Now it is the first.
A city that actually works
The numbers have followed the narrative. Property prices in Milan have risen 38% over the past five years, and by November 2025, the city had surpassed Venice as Italy’s most expensive, reaching an average of €5,171 per square metre.
Diletta Giorgolo, head of Sotheby’s residential real estate office in Milan, estimates there are now 30-40% more international buyers in the market than two years ago, with a critical shift in buyer intent: “Previously, they sought second homes; now, they want full Italian residency. International schools and major airports are key.”
The city’s infrastructure has kept pace, with a new superfast railway links the city centre and Linate airport, a tap-in tap-out metro has been expanded, and a new tier of hotels, restaurants, bars and private members’ clubs – including incoming branches of Casa Cipriani and Soho House – are raising hospitality standards towards those of London and New York.
VAT on art sales and imports has been cut from 22% to 5%, attracting international galleries including Thaddaeus Ropac, and Via Monte Napoleone, which surpassed New York’s Fifth Avenue as the world’s most expensive shopping street in 2024, is repositioning itself to reclaim that crown.
The structural argument for Milan over its Italian rivals is blunt. Unlike Rome or Venice, Milan “actually works” – no overtourism problem, a strategic location with easy access to the lakes, mountains and coastline, and what observers describe as a restlessness and obsession with reinvention.
For the UHNW buyer calibrated to London or Singapore, that operational coherence matters as much as the lifestyle.
The wider wealth migration context
Milan’s rise cannot be read in isolation. It is one front in a broader, accelerating renegotiation of where global wealth chooses to reside.
As traditional wealth hubs tighten their rules, an estimated 3,600 millionaires chose Italy as a place of residence in 2025 – more than the traditional tax-haven benchmarks of Monaco and Switzerland combined, according to Henley & Partners.
Milan currently ranks third on the global list of inbound wealth migration and is home to 115,000 millionaires and 17 billionaires, placing it eleventh among the world’s wealthiest cities and third in Europe.
Relocation consultant Armand Arton, who advises billionaire families on residency and citizenship strategies, summarises the current moment with characteristic precision: “Italy has the best benefits: a flat tax and good quality of life. People leaving the UAE can see themselves living in Rome or Milan quite easily as international, metropolitan centres.”
Can Milan dethrone Dubai?
As one adviser told The Guardian: “When the map changes, the money moves first.” The map has changed. But whether that makes Milan Dubai’s permanent successor is a more complicated question.
S&P has stopped short of predicting a wholesale market crash, noting that the UAE government’s visa reforms and crisis management response have created a degree of stability and stickiness for existing residents and investors.
Arton himself is measured: he remains positive that Dubai will “rebound from the current question of doubt around security.” The geopolitical situation is volatile by definition, and the Gulf’s structural advantages – zero income tax on earnings rather than a flat annual levy, world-class connectivity, a sovereign wealth ecosystem – have not disappeared.
What has changed is the perception of risk. For UHNW families operating on decade-long planning horizons – weighing school continuity, asset protection frameworks, legal stability, and the integrity of the residency pathway – the events of recent weeks have introduced a variable that cannot be easily priced.
Italy, and Milan specifically, offers a compelling counter-argument: EU membership, a mature legal system, and a flat-tax regime that has now been road-tested across two governments.
The question Milan must answer is whether it can absorb an accelerated influx of international wealth without straining the very qualities that make it attractive.
History suggests the city is constitutionally inclined towards reinvention. The money is, for now, betting on it.
