Moving abroad to save tax: three numbers to run before you go

Normally that thought is about chasing the sun. This year it’s the other way round. England has just had its driest July in 190 years, and southern England its driest month ever recorded. You’ll probably have seen the drone shot of All Saints on Blackheath doing the rounds in the nationals. Brown grass to the horizon, Canary Wharf cropped out of frame, and it could be California.

So the pull isn’t sunshine. We’ve had plenty of that. It’s a pool at the end of a hot day, and heat that arrives with a beach attached rather than a hosepipe ban.

I’ve had a version of that conversation a few times this year. A client, comfortable by any measure, tells me they’re thinking about leaving the UK. The holiday planted the idea. The tax headlines watered it. And by the time they’re sitting across from me, the move has become a financial decision, because “we’d save a fortune in tax” sounds more sensible than “I liked the pool.”

So I ask the same question every time. The tax you’re trying to escape: is it coming out of money you’d ever actually spend? Usually there’s a pause. Because usually the answer is no.

Surplus money is a different kind of money

For a lot of the people I sit down with, the picture looks like this. There’s the money they will spend: the holidays, the house, the help for the kids. And then there’s the rest. The pile that grows faster than they draw on it. Money they’ll never touch, not because they’re careful, but because there’s simply more than one lifetime needs.
Tax on that surplus changes nothing about your actual life. Whether it goes to the Treasury or sits in the pile, your Tuesday looks the same. You’d never have got to that money. You just don’t like watching it leave.

Three numbers before you book the flight

Before anyone prices up a villa, I want to see three figures side by side. What you’ll realistically spend for the rest of your life. What you hold. And what the tax actually costs, in pounds, over the years you’d feel it.

When that third number comes entirely out of the gap between the first two, you’re not protecting your lifestyle. You’re protecting a pile you’ll never open.

When the move does add up

Sometimes it’s the right call, and I’ll say so. If the tax at stake is money you genuinely need, if family already lives out there, if the life you want is somewhere else anyway – that’s a different conversation, and a perfectly good one.

The point isn’t that leaving is always wrong. It’s that the decision deserves better arithmetic than a headline and a bad mood.

What’s actually in the removal van

So weigh the other side of the ledger. Grandchildren twenty minutes away. Friends of forty years. Your GP, who knows your history without asking. Sunday lunch that nobody has to fly to. The M&S at the Standard. A taxi home from the theatre instead of a hotel.

None of that appears on a tax return, which is exactly why it gets left out of the sums. A fortnight’s holiday doesn’t test any of it. You don’t need a GP on holiday. You don’t miss your friends in two weeks. Permanence tests everything.

The flows are worth a look. In the year to December 2025, around 246,000 British nationals left the UK. In the same period, about 110,000 came the other way.  And research on older British people in Spain has found the same pattern for decades: the returns that do happen tend to come when health falters or family is needed.  People go back, in other words, for the very things they left behind.

The couple who stayed

Take a retired couple I spoke with recently, rattled by the headlines and pricing up a life overseas. We ran their three numbers. Every penny of the tax they were fleeing sat in money they’d never spend. They stayed. Last I heard, they’d booked three weeks back at the same villa. As a holiday.

That’s the sum worth doing before any flight gets booked. Not “how much tax would we save” but “what would we actually be trading, and for what.” If you’re wrestling with the same question, let’s put the numbers on the table together. The actual answer might be a longer holiday and the same front door.

Daren Wallbank, Co-founder and Chartered Financial Planner

 ¹ONS, Long-term international migration, provisional: year ending December 2025, published 21 May 2026.
 ²Giner-Monfort and Hall, “Older British migrants in Spain: return patterns and intentions post-Brexit”, Population, Space and Place, vol. 30, 2024.

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