Dubai Rising: Is the Global Centre of Gravity for Family Offices Shifting?

Around 200 family offices joined the Dubai’s offshore financial centre last year, according to the DIFC, taking the total to 800.

This surge reflects a broader reordering of the global wealth landscape—one that is now prompting long-established Swiss family offices, some managing billions of assets, to relocate to Dubai. As the FT reports, Switzerland’s increasing regulatory burden, diminishing confidentiality, and potential tax volatility (including the proposal of a 50% inheritance tax) are unsettling long-held assumptions about its stability as a family office hub. This stability is under further threat amid an environment of growth and competition overseas.

What is perhaps even more striking is that we are now seeing UK-based family offices—traditionally staunchly loyal to London—beginning to explore options in Dubai at an early stage, amid concerns that the UK’s long-term appeal for wealth holders is in slow decline. The end of the non-dom regime and increasing uncertainty around fiscal policy are certainly contributing factors.

Dubai, meanwhile, continues to invest in and highlight its appeal. Last year, the DIFC launched the first Family Wealth Centre of its kind in the world—a bold move to deepen its ecosystem for global family wealth, support succession planning, and help family businesses future-proof their long-term growth. This has not gone unnoticed, as Dubai continues to attract some of the top corporate, family office and trust services talent from across the world, further cementing its growing status as the wealth centre of the future.

As private wealth specialists, we see first-hand how priorities are shifting among wealth holders and their increasingly international families. Today’s structuring decisions are about more than tax—they centre on predictability, control, and long-term resilience. In this new environment, Dubai offers an increasingly attractive mix: a favourable regulatory stance, strong lifestyle appeal, privacy and security and jurisdictional flexibility. However, the regime is still seen as fairly new and some families do still prefer the 'tried and tested' framework in the more "traditional" wealth centres.

This raises important questions for advisers:

• Are traditional centres of wealth ready to compete in this new paradigm, and is their current appeal enough to justify certain tax, regulatory, and costs disadvantages?
• How can we proactively support families looking to future-proof their structures?
• Is now a good time to take stock of wealth holding structures to determine if current arrangements are fit for purpose and/or if the structure should be redomiciled? 
• What does meaningful jurisdictional diversification look like in 2025 and beyond?

The momentum behind this shift is growing—and the time to engage with it is now.