Setting up a family office in Dubai: is it right for you?

A few years ago, hardly anyone asked us about family offices. Now it comes up most weeks. Usually it is someone who has just worked out that the UK is about to treat their wealth very differently, and who wants to know whether Dubai is a sensible place to hold the lot.

The honest answer is “quite possibly, but not for the reason you think, and not before you have done something else first.” So let me walk through it properly.

What a family office actually does

Strip away the mystique and a family office is just a private company, or a small team, whose only client is your family. At the simple end, it is one or two people handling investments, property, reporting and the paperwork that real wealth generates. At the larger end, it runs philanthropy, manages succession between generations, and keeps lawyers, accountants and bankers across several countries pointing the same way so you do not have to.

Most people who ask us about one sit in the middle. They have enough wealth, and enough moving parts, that running it off the corner of a desk has stopped working.

Why so many are choosing Dubai

The tax picture is the honest headline. There is no personal income tax, no capital gains tax on your investments, and no inheritance or estate tax. For a family used to the UK, where all three bite hard, that is a genuine change rather than a rounding error.

But tax alone does not explain it, because plenty of low-tax places exist and most people do not move their affairs there. What has moved the needle is that Dubai built the plumbing. The DIFC set up a Family Wealth Centre and a proper legal framework for family arrangements. Abu Dhabi’s ADGM has its own regime. That matters more than it sounds, because a family office is only as sound as the structure underneath it, and “low tax with no real legal framework” is how people end up in trouble.

Then there are the unglamorous reasons that actually decide these things. It is a stable, well-run jurisdiction. The banking and the professional advisers are genuinely there. The time zone sits neatly between London and Asia. Families come for the tax and stay because everything works.

Who it is genuinely for

This is the part people find least comfortable, so I will be straight about it. A single-family office is an expensive thing to run properly, and it only earns its keep once your wealth is large enough that the cost of running it is small against what it saves and protects. In practice that tends to mean investable wealth in the tens of millions, not the low millions.

Below that level, you are almost always better served by a good private bank, a sensible set of structures and the right advisers, without the overhead of your own office. Part of our job is telling people when they do not need one yet. Nobody else in the chain has much reason to.

The bit people miss: your UK tax position comes first

Here is the mistake we see most. Someone builds a beautiful Dubai structure, then assumes the UK is behind them. It is not. Moving your wealth does not move your tax residence. Until you have genuinely broken UK residence under the Statutory Residence Test, and stayed non-resident long enough for it to hold, HMRC can still have a claim on you, and on gains you thought were safely offshore.

The family office is the destination. Leaving the UK cleanly is the road that gets you there. Do them in the wrong order and you can end up with a smart structure and a live UK tax bill at the same time, which is the worst of both.

So, is it right for you?

This is not a decision to make off the back of a blog post. The right answer depends on how much wealth you have, what kind it is (a business, a portfolio, property, or a mix), where your family actually lives, and what you want to happen in twenty years rather than two. But if you are leaving the UK anyway and the numbers are large, a Dubai base is a serious option, and it deserves a proper look rather than a shrug.