Family Offices: Best Jurisdictions Worldwide – Where families diversify wealth, residence and identity

Across the world, family offices are multiplying, and the range of services they offer is widening. They are also becoming multijurisdictional, supporting families across several countries and managing not only wealth but the wider cross-border needs that come with it. 

The wealth of families with family offices is projected to grow from US$5.5 trillion in 2024 to US$9.5 trillion by 2030, with the number of single family offices worldwide rising from 8,030 to 10,720 (Deloitte, 2024). Jurisdictions, for their part, are competing openly for them. In Singapore, the number of new single family offices doubled in 2024, bringing the number awarded tax incentives to about 2,000 (Asia Asset Management, 2025).  

Two developments make this worth examining now. The relevant legal provisions and changes are quite recent. Hong Kong’s concession dates from 2023, and India’s and Malaysia’s frameworks from 2025, so the field is still forming rather than settled. Families, moreover, are no longer choosing a single place: as wealth, residence and succession spread across borders, the question becomes which jurisdictions suit which parts of a family’s life. 

This briefing takes that question in two steps. It first groups the thirty-three jurisdictions by the role each plays in the market for family offices. It then scores them all, across Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Americas, the Middle East and Africa, on nine indicators in four weighted pillars: stability and reputation, regime and tax, ecosystem and center depth, and status and succession. The first three bear mainly on the office; the fourth prices what a jurisdiction offers the family. 

The thirty-three jurisdictions fall into three groups. Eight are established centers, defending business they have held for decades: Singapore, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Luxembourg, the United States, the United Kingdom, Liechtenstein and Monaco. Nine are emerging contenders, most of them bidding for it with frameworks built recently: the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, India, Malaysia, Italy, Uruguay, Portugal, Saudi Arabia and Panama. Since a mature ecosystem and a new incentive are not the same evidence, however, the two groups are ranked in separate tables rather than in one list. The remaining sixteen are origin markets, among them Germany, France, Spain, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, China, Japan and Australia. These are scored on the same basis but reported alongside the rankings rather than ranked. 

A family office is, in EY’s formulation, “a family-owned organization that manages private wealth and other family affairs” (Teo, 2024). Its function is long-term rather than transactional: to preserve a family’s wealth across generations and to facilitate the transfer of assets to subsequent generations (Siaba et al., 2026). The distinction between forms is one of clientele. A single family office serves one blood-related family, whereas a multi-family office may serve multiple unrelated families (Decker & Lange, 2016). 

The structure is considerably older than the present wave of policy interest suggests. Amit et al. (2008, p. 4) trace the modern single family office to the mid-nineteenth century, when private banks and trust companies were established to help the entrepreneurs of the Industrial Revolution manage newly created wealth. Their charge then, as now, was to protect a particular family’s investments and assets for both current and subsequent generations. 

Because these needs grow with the family, the structure tends to evolve rather than be selected once. PwC (2021) distinguishes five forms as presented below. 

Figure 1. The five forms a family office takes. 

Why families establish them 

Amit et al. (2008, p. 4) find that affluent families have been drawn to single family offices, rather than to commercial banks, investment comp anies or other wealth management providers, by the promise of exclusivity, privacy and customization. 

All three follow from ownership. An office owned by one family has no other clients competing for its capacity, and because it is not selling services to third parties it can be built to the family’s shape rather than to a provider’s product range. 

Succession has since become central. EY identifies ownership, leadership and wealth transitions, alongside the family’s vision and legacy, as core reasons for establishing an office (Teo, 2024). Practice reflects this: a majority of family offices, 57%, now maintain a wealth succession plan for family members, even as progress on governance and operating models has moved more slowly than on investment processes (UBS, 2026, pp. 39, 43). 

The multijurisdictional turn 

The most recent shift is geographic rather than organizational. Some 88% of family offices hold bankable assets in two or more jurisdictions, described as multishoring strategies intended to limit reliance on any single location and to preserve flexibility should geopolitical or regulatory conditions deteriorate (UBS, 2026, p. 12). 

The practice runs deeper than a second base. Three jurisdictions are the most common answer, given by 34% of family offices, and 32% report four or more (UBS, 2026, p. 12). It is also unevenly spread. No family office surveyed in Latin America or North Asia reported holding assets in a single jurisdiction, against 35% in the United States. The multijurisdictional family office is therefore already the norm rather than the direction of travel, which makes the question of which jurisdiction serves which purpose a live one for most families rather than a few. 

Motivation is not primarily fiscal. UBS’s Head of Wealth Transfer, Networks and Client Office observes that holding assets across jurisdictions is a question of resilience rather than return, with legal protection, asset security and access to opportunity mattering more than tax, and that assets consequently gravitate toward a small number of trusted global hubs rather than being spread indiscriminately (UBS, 2026, p. 13). 

The exposure that concentration creates is specific rather than abstract. A family whose assets, office and residence all sit in one jurisdiction meets the whole range of jurisdictional risk at a single point: currency and capital controls, changes in how assets already held are taxed or passed on, regulatory reversal, and at the limit expropriation. Global Citizen Solutions’ Global Atlas of Risk and Readiness scores countries on exactly this combination of structural risk and forward-looking readiness (Global Citizen Solutions, 2026a). Its leading jurisdictions, Switzerland, Germany and Singapore, all stand out in this index as well: the first two lead the established table, and Germany is one of only six jurisdictions here clearing the median on both the office and the family. 

Jurisdiction has therefore become part of the design of a family office rather than an accident of where wealth was created, and a growing number of countries have responded by building dedicated regimes to compete for it. That competition is what this briefing sets out to examine. 

What follows from this is a change in the question families are asking. Portfolios were already dispersed: the UBS Global Family Office Report 2026, drawn from 307 family offices across more than thirty markets, finds continued diversification across regions and currencies, with North America still dominant but growing interest in Asia-Pacific and Western Europe (UBS, 2026). The family’s own geography, however, can matter as much as the portfolio’s. As family members live, study, work and hold assets in different jurisdictions, decisions on investment, tax residence, succession and mobility begin to intersect, and the traditional idea that a family office has a single home becomes harder to sustain. A family may keep its administrative base in one jurisdiction, its assets in several others and its members’ residence in yet another. The question shifts, in other words, from where the family office is to which jurisdictions serve which parts of the family’s life. On this reading, the family office is becoming less a single location than a cross-border infrastructure for managing the family, its wealth and its future. 

That reading is also why this index carries a pillar for status and succession, weighted at 20% and covering the route to a second passport and the tax charged when wealth passes to a spouse or child. It prices what a family is buying when it builds an alternative base, rather than what a jurisdiction offers an institution. As the sections that follow show, the two questions come apart more often than they meet. 

Jurisdiction selection: The briefing analyzes thirty-three jurisdictions, of which seventeen are ranked in two tables: eight established centers and nine emerging ones. The remaining sixteen are origin markets, none of which has built a framework for the family office, scored on the same nine indicators and reported in the analysis below. Selection combines geographic coverage, advisory experience and expert judgment, checked against comparable published work.  

The result covers ten jurisdictions in Europe, nine in Asia-Pacific, nine in the Americas, three in the Middle East and two in Africa, following where family office activity is concentrated rather than any attempt at balance.  

The figure below illustrates better what the index measures: 

Figure 2. The nine indicators and their weights in the composite. 

The data come from publicly available sources, among them the Worldwide Governance Indicators, PwC Worldwide Tax Summaries, the EY tax guides and the Global Financial Centres Index, with the same source used for every jurisdiction (World Bank, 2025; Council of the European Union, 2026; FATF, 2026; PwC, 2026a; EY, 2025a, 2025b; SWFI, 2026; Z/Yen Partners, 2026). 

Each pillar rests on two or three indicators, shown in Figure 2, and each answers a different question. Stability and reputation (30%) asks whether the courts and the jurisdiction’s standing can be relied on, and carries the heaviest weight because the other three depend on it. Regime and tax (25%) asks what has been legislated for the family office and what it charges; it is the pillar a government can move within a budget cycle. Ecosystem and center depth (25%) asks whether the advisers, bankers and other families are already there, which no statute can produce. Status and succession (20%) asks what the jurisdiction offers the family rather than the office, through the route to a second passport and the tax charged when wealth passes to a spouse or child. The ordering of the weights follows the ordering of the dependencies. Stability carries most because the other three rest on it; status and succession carries least because it prices one part of the family’s position rather than the viability of the office. 

The index is then built in four steps: collection, normalization, scaling and weighting. Each indicator is gathered from those sources for the same reference period, then placed on a common 0–100 scale by min-max across the sample, so that 100 is the strongest value observed among the thirty-three rather than an absolute standard. Where a low figure is the better outcome, as with a tax rate or a financial center rank, the scale is reversed first, so that 100 always marks the strongest position. Family office counts are log-scaled, since they run from zero to several hundred against a median of seven. The nine scores are then multiplied by the weights shown in Figure 2 and summed to a composite.  

Novelty: Three choices set this index apart. The first is that it prices the family’s own position and not only the office’s, through the status and succession pillar described above. The second is that the ranked jurisdictions are published in two tables rather than one. The third is the regime indicator, coded from primary law rather than from secondary summaries, so that what a jurisdiction is credited with is what its law actually grants a single family. 

Limitations: The count of family offices understates activity, and it does so unevenly, as elaborated further. The succession measure records the statutory rate on a transfer to a spouse or direct descendant, not what a family pays after reliefs, and the corporate measure uses the headline rate rather than the effective rate after participation exemptions. Each applies on the same basis everywhere, however, so the limitation is shared rather than selective. Two further limits are specific. A statutory zero on succession can still carry a liability at death, as it does in Canada, Australia, Argentina and three Swiss cantons. And center depth is measured by rank in the Global Financial Centres Index rather than by rating, so the intervals between places are ordinal rather than proportional; Montevideo is not ranked there at all, and Uruguay carries an imputed value one place below the lowest ranked center. 

Singapore’s position at the head of the index comes from consistency rather than dominance: among the established eight it leads on one pillar and ranks third or fourth on the other three, and its lowest pillar score is 82.  

Figure 3. Established centers, index and pillar scores. 

The top four differ in kind rather than in quality. Singapore pairs a purpose-built regime under sections 13O, 13OA and 13U of the Income Tax Act 1947 (Monetary Authority of Singapore [MAS], 2024) with exemption for the qualifying income of those funds, no tax on foreign-sourced income received by individuals, and the world’s fourth-ranked financial center (Z/Yen Partners, 2026). One structural condition attaches, and it is nationality: under the Constitution, an applicant for naturalization must first take an oath renouncing any other nationality, and a Singaporean who acquires a foreign citizenship may be deprived of Singapore citizenship by order of the Government (Constitution of the Republic of Singapore, 1963/2020, Articles 127 and 134).  

Switzerland, by contrast, leads the index on status and succession, narrowly ahead of Portugal: an open path to citizenship, no inheritance tax in the direct line in most cantons (EY, 2025b), and a lump-sum arrangement that runs indefinitely (EY, 2025a). Switzerland has never written a dedicated family office framework, relying instead on the carve-out in Article 2(2)(a) of the Financial Institutions Act (Swiss Confederation, 2018). 

Hong Kong matches it on regime and tax through the profits tax concession for family-owned investment holding vehicles, in operation since 19 May 2023 (Inland Revenue Department, 2023). Its constraint is of a different kind: seven years of ordinary residence confer permanent residence and the right of abode, but not a nationality, and the HKSAR passport requires Chinese nationality, which a foreign national can acquire only by discretionary naturalization. Luxembourg has a similar shape, scoring 100 on stability, meaning its courts and clean standing, and 94 on status and succession, with a thinner ecosystem behind it. 

Figure 4. Emerging centers, index and pillar scores. 

Among the emerging nine, the United Arab Emirates outranks four of the eight established centers on this index, with purpose-built frameworks under the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) Family Arrangements Regulations and at Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM), no personal income tax, and Dubai seventh in the world as a financial center (Z/Yen Partners, 2026). DIFC reported 1,408 family business-related entities at the end of June 2026, a rise of 36% over the year (DIFC, 2026). It is ranked as emerging because the two tables divide on sequence rather than on score: the DIFC was founded in 2004 and wrote its family office framework in 2008 to attract an industry that did not yet exist, where the established eight accommodated one that was already there. 

Qatar offers a comparable framework under the Qatar Financial Centre’s (QFC) Single Family Office Regulations with a smaller ecosystem behind it. Neither offers a route to citizenship a foreign family could plan around. 

India and Malaysia are a different proposition. Each has built its regime inside a designated zone rather than across the jurisdiction. India’s Family Investment Fund framework, in Part C of the IFSCA (Fund Management) Regulations 2025, gives it one of the strongest regime and tax scores in the set, though the relief is a ten-year holiday rather than a standing rate, which is largely why it scores below the Gulf on that pillar. Its exemption for new residents runs two to three years (EY, 2025a). Malaysia grants a zero rate to approved single family office vehicles in Pulau 1 of the Forest City Special Financial Zone under guidelines issued in October 2025. 

The remaining five lack a purpose-built family office regime, and four of them lead on the family rather than on the office. Italy charges 4% in the direct line (EY, 2025b), offers an open route to citizenship and runs a flat-fee regime for fifteen years (EY, 2025a). Portugal does not charge on a transfer to a spouse or child and holds one of the strongest passports on the Enhanced Mobility Index (Global Citizen Solutions, 2026); its 2024 replacement of non-habitual residence with IFICI runs ten years, requires qualifying employment and is not open to a family relocating on wealth alone (EY, 2025a). Uruguay offers an eleven-year exemption to new residents, and Panama territorial taxation with an open route to citizenship (EY, 2025a). Saudi Arabia is the exception among them, courting family office capital under Vision 2030 while a dedicated framework is still to come; its 45 on status and succession is level with Qatar and the Emirates. 

The sixteen origin markets: The sixteen are Germany, France, Spain, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Argentina, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Vietnam, Nigeria and South Africa. They run from 65.4 to 22.2 on the composite, a wider spread than either ranked table. Canada leads them on 65.4, ahead of Australia on 65.2 and Germany on 64.0, and all three out-score Liechtenstein and Monaco as well as five or six of the nine emerging centers. 

The surprise is where they score well. On status and succession, Canada and Australia both reach 97 and Argentina 95, out-scoring seven of the eight established centers; Mexico, Brazil and Colombia out-score six. What a jurisdiction offers the family, an open route to citizenship and little or no tax on a transfer to a spouse or child, turns out to be widely available outside the centers built for the office. Moreover, Germany is the clearest outlier in the index. It ranks fourth of thirty-three on stability and sixth on market depth, the two pillars no government can legislate, and twenty-fourth on the one it can. It already holds what the emerging centers are trying to build, and has no dedicated family office regime of the kind Singapore or the Emirates offer. The Latin American markets show the division from the other direction. Mexico ranks eighth of thirty-three for the family and thirtieth for the office, Brazil eleventh and twenty-seventh, Argentina sixth and last. 

The sixteen therefore do more than fill out the sample. They show that market depth and a strong position for the family both exist outside the ranked set, and that what separates the seventeen is not those conditions but the decision to compete for the business. 

Reading the two tables together 

Read side by side, the two tables separate on only two of the four pillars. The widest gap is ecosystem and center depth, where the established eight average 65 against 39 for the emerging nine, and stability and reputation follows at 89 against 65. On regime and tax the emerging nine are marginally ahead and on status and succession, the two groups are effectively level. 

That pattern matters more than the individual figures. The two pillars that distinguish the groups reflect conditions that develop over decades and cannot be created through a single budget or legislative change. By contrast, the two that do not distinguish them are precisely those that governments can change through policy. An emerging center can therefore match an established one on paper relatively quickly, as the regime scores show. What takes longer to develop are the broader conditions beyond the statute book. 

Figure 5. Average pillar scores for the three groups of jurisdictions. 

The same comparison, extended to the sixteen origin markets, produces the clearest division in the index. None of the sixteen has built a framework for the family office, which is why none of them is ranked. On three of the four pillars they are indistinguishable from the emerging centers; on regime and tax they average 9 against 63. Canada and Australia nonetheless out-score six of the nine emerging centers on the composite. 

What distinguishes an origin market from an emerging center, therefore, is almost entirely the presence of a dedicated regime. The cost of entering this competition is legislative rather than institutional, and entry alone does not establish a position within it. 

Overall, mobility is better understood as one of the pillars of a modern family office than as a service alongside it. A family that has settled where to site its office has answered part of the question: where its members hold residence and what status they can obtain. Global Citizen Solutions works on that pillar: which residence or citizenship route, in which jurisdiction, and how it fits the structure a family’s tax and legal advisers are building.  

João Pacheco, Head of Institutional Client Relations at Global Citizen Solutions: 

“Families have diversified their assets for generations. What is new is that they are diversifying their citizenships as well, and those two decisions are increasingly taken by the same people at the same table.” 

Families reach that pillar by three routes. The first is geopolitical: residence and citizenship across several jurisdictions leave a family less exposed to change in any one of them. The second is structural, letting wealth planning and succession be arranged around a regime chosen deliberately rather than inherited by accident of birth. The third is generational, and it is usually the one that settles the decision: a second passport gives the next generation the freedom to study, work and settle where it chooses. 

The count is a floor, not a census 

Every statement in this briefing about where family offices are located rests on a single indicator, and its limits are themselves a finding. The count used here records 990 offices across the thirty-three jurisdictions and comes from the only publicly available source covering all of them on one basis (SWFI, 2026). It captures offices that are publicly identifiable, which is an uneven and probably small share of those that exist. 

Where a government publishes its own figure, the difference runs to one or two orders of magnitude. Singapore’s regulator reported about 2,000 single family offices holding tax incentives at the end of 2024 (Asia Asset Management, 2025) against the 62 the database records. Hong Kong’s 16 sit against more than 3,380 in operation (Financial Services and the Treasury Bureau & InvestHK, 2026). Within the index, eighteen of the thirty-three record seven offices or fewer, and seven record none. 

Two things follow. The index treats this count as a minimum rather than a total, and compresses it so that a jurisdiction recording several hundred offices cannot overwhelm the others. The second point concerns the sector rather than the measurement. Where an industry is well established, someone counts it; that no two governments here count the same way, and most do not count at all, indicates how recently this competition began.  

Density is not competitiveness 

Read with that floor in mind, the density pattern needs stating carefully. On the recorded count, the United States holds the largest concentration in this index, and Germany and Switzerland the largest in continental Europe, at forty offices and thirty-nine (SWFI, 2026); none of the three has a purpose-built family office regime. On governments’ own figures the ordering changes, since Singapore and Hong Kong between them report several thousand offices against the 466 the database records for the United States, where no government figure exists. What survives both readings is the same observation: in the mature centers, density accumulated without a regime designed to produce it. 

A regime does not explain why a country has many family offices, and a large number does not prove the regime worked. What keeps offices in place is the depth of the market: the advisers, the services and the other families already there. For a government, generous terms open the door, but the industry behind them takes a decade to build rather than a budget cycle. For a family reading the two tables, the ecosystem score shows what already exists, and the regime score what has been offered. 

The office and the family rarely coincide 

The index measures two things at once, and they do not move together. Each jurisdiction can be scored on what it offers an office, through regime, tax, financial center depth and the offices already present, and separately on what it offers the family, through the route to status and the tax charged when wealth passes to the next generation. Across the thirty-three, the two measures turn out to be close to unrelated, so a jurisdiction’s standing on one says almost nothing about its standing on the other. 

The extremes make the point. The United Arab Emirates ranks second of thirty-three for the office and twenty-eighth for the family; Hong Kong third and twentieth; Qatar sixth, and level with the Emirates for the family. It holds in reverse at the other end, where Argentina ranks sixth for the family and last for the office, and Portugal second and twenty-sixth. Only six jurisdictions clear the sample median on both: Singapore, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Canada, Australia and Germany, with the United Kingdom and Panama sitting exactly on one of the two lines. 

What those six share matters more than how many there are. Only one of them, Singapore, has a purpose-built family office regime; the other five reach the office side largely through market depth that was already in place, Luxembourg through a privileged wealth vehicle alongside it. A concession can move a jurisdiction on the office measure within a budget cycle, and moving it on both at once is far harder, because one side rests on law and the other on infrastructure that accumulates. The practical reading for a family is that expecting a single jurisdiction to serve both purposes narrows the field to a few options, while treating the office and the family as two separate decisions opens it considerably. 

More routes are open than the headlines suggest 

Seen from the family’s side, that division is less constraining than it appears. Twenty-five of the thirty-three jurisdictions scored offer a foreign family a route to citizenship, and twenty-one of those place no restriction on it and permit dual nationality, so a family need not surrender the passport it already holds in order to add one. 

Figure 6. How many of the thirty-three clear each successive test. 

Narrowing the test does not empty the field. Sixteen of the twenty-one lead to a passport scoring 85 or better on the Enhanced Mobility Index, normalized so that the strongest passport in the set reads 100 (Global Citizen Solutions, 2026), and nine of those also charge 5% or less on a transfer to a spouse or child: Switzerland, Portugal, Canada, Australia, Argentina and Mexico charge nothing at all, Uruguay 3%, Italy 4% and Luxembourg 5%. 

Four of those nine also clear the sample median for the office: Switzerland, Luxembourg, Canada and Australia, four of the six identified above. None of the nine, however, has a purpose-built family office regime. The constraint on a mobile family is therefore rarely the absence of an option, since nine workable routes out of thirty-three is a wide field. It is that the routes and the purpose-built centers do not overlap, so a family that wants both is choosing from a few options rather than from the full field, and the arrangement has to be deliberate at the point the structure is designed rather than inherited from wherever the wealth happens to be managed.  

The openness is also regionally concentrated. All nine jurisdictions of the Americas scored here offer a foreign family a route to citizenship and permit dual nationality, which is true of no other large region: Europe is held back by Liechtenstein and Monaco, Asia-Pacific by six of its nine, and no Gulf jurisdiction offers a route at all. 

The jurisdictions leading this index are not simply those offering the lowest tax. They are those offering courts a family can rely on, a regime written for the structure it actually uses, and a professional market deep enough to staff it. Tax matters, but on this evidence it is not sufficient on its own. What matters is how these elements come together around the way a family actually lives, manages and passes on its wealth. 

The more useful question, then, is not which jurisdiction ranks highest, but which profile fits the family. Among the seventeen ranked, a family whose priority is the office itself is choosing between Singapore, the Emirates and Hong Kong. A family whose priority is where it will live is choosing between Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Singapore. A family whose priority is status and succession is choosing between Switzerland, Portugal and Italy. No jurisdiction appears on all three. Singapore and Switzerland each appear twice, but on opposite pairs: Singapore on the office and the living, Switzerland on the living and the status. The result is that most families are not choosing a single jurisdiction so much as assembling a combination of strengths. That is where a ranking earns its place: not by declaring one jurisdiction the answer, but by turning a long list of possibilities into an informed short one.