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How the world’s largest wealth creator became Henley’s biggest source of Plan B demand. |
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One Number
The growth in applications from US nationals for residence and citizenship programs at Henley & Partners in 2025, against 2024. Henley & Partners, Private Wealth Migration Report 2026, 16 June 2026 Only 7% of those American applicants already lived abroad. The rest applied from home. |
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One Argument Wealth used to move after a crisis. Now it buys insurance before one.For a decade, wealth migration had a scoreboard: Henley & Partners, the London-based residence and citizenship adviser, published an annual count of millionaires on the move. Its 2025 report forecast 142,000 relocations that year and 165,000 in 2026. The pattern was familiar — capital leaving a state it no longer trusted (Russian money after 2022, Venezuelan money before that). The US was on the other side of the ledger, with Henley expecting it to gain millionaires in 2025, second only to the United Arab Emirates. Henley’s 2026 report drops the headcount entirely, after critics questioned whether the data could support that precision. What replaced it says even more. The US is now Henley’s largest single source of clients. Applications from US nationals doubled in 2025 and stayed high into 2026. Nearly half of them target European programs. On Henley’s new 100-point score for how well a country competes for mobile wealth, the US gets 62.3. The UK scores 68.3. Latvia — 71.7. Henley names three drivers. The US taxes its citizens wherever they live. Its tax system is complex, and its immigration processing is slow. None of that is a collapse. It is the running cost of an American passport, and the wealthy have started to price it. Henley itself describes families arranging their lives so that no one government controls everything they own. Meanwhile, their money stays invested wherever returns are strongest. They are not leaving. They are buying the right to. Every figure above comes from a firm that sells second passports. A doubling of applications may say more about its market share than about the US. A second adviser, CS Global Partners, shares the bias but also the finding: US nationals now make up 21% of citizenship-by-investment applications worldwide. Demand is not departure. On Henley’s last count, the US was still a net importer of millionaires. Nobody can say how many wealthy Americans will leave. The US Treasury quarterly list of people giving up citizenship named 1,781 people in Q2 2026, against 1,057 in Q2 2025. That list runs 12 to 18 months behind events, so read it as a direction, not a size. It measures the exit, and few go that far. Many more pay for the option and never use it.
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One Position Read a second passport as a price, not a departure. When the wealthiest residents of a stable major economy pay for an exit they don’t intend to use, they are putting a number on US political and fiscal risk. They see that risk from closer than any outside forecaster and have their own skin in the game. For anyone with US revenue, US investors or US partners, that is a better signal than any count of millionaires on the move. It belongs in the risk conversation as a sign of fragility, not on the action list. I would change my mind if Henley’s next report shows US applications back at 2024 levels and the Treasury list flattens. That would make 2025 a political spike, not a new habit.
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