United Kingdom

The Great British Exodus: Taxes, Housing Costs, and Terrible Healthcare Are Driving Young Brits Away

More than 1.2 million British nationals have left the United Kingdom since 2021.

Reem Ibrahim | From the November 2026 issue

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(Illustration: Joanna Andreasson)

"I can't believe more people aren't doing it," says 28-year-old William Bowden. He relocated from the U.K. to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, last year. In Britain, "Nothing works as it should do. Even if it does work, you feel like you're getting ripped off—and then it's raining on top of that."

Bowden grew up in Leigh-on-Sea—a seaside town in Essex that was voted the second-happiest place to live in the East of England—situated about 45 minutes east of London by train. He lived with his mother and younger sister in a detached house, overlooking the banks of the Thames Estuary. After graduating from the University of Kent, he started working as a ship broker in London. He had what most people would consider a good job in the city, but it felt impossible to buy even a modest family home in the town he grew up in.

"For the majority of people in the U.K., buying a home is almost a pipe dream without parental assistance these days," he says. Even buying a three-bedroom semi-detached house on a U.K. salary with its high tax burden felt "a million miles away." About 52 percent of first-time buyers received assistance from the bank of mum and dad in 2024.

But after Bowden relocated to the Middle East, the calculation changed. Bowden was doing similar work, yet his salary went much further. He could live in an apartment with amenities that would have been unaffordable in London. The UAE does not levy a personal income tax on salaries or wages. "Even if I hadn't had a salary increase," Bowden says, "I'd be 30-40 percent better off."

The contrast was so stark that it changed his original plan. "When I first moved…I wanted to be [in Dubai] for three to five years, earn enough money to be able to start a family," and move back to the U.K. "I loved my upbringing [in Britain] and being around family," he says. But after spending a few months in Dubai, he realized starting a family would be far easier there. "I don't think, at this stage, my intention will be to come back to the United Kingdom anytime soon."

Bowden is one of more than 1.2 million British nationals who have left the United Kingdom since 2021. In 2025 alone, 246,000 Brits moved away from the country.

The vast majority of Brits leaving are not elderly pensioners seeking better weather in retirement. They are young, ambitious people who have decided they must exit Britain to achieve their personal and professional goals. Roughly two-thirds of British nationals who left the U.K. from April 2024 through March 2025 were ages 16–34, according to government data. The net loss in younger age groups has grown every year since 2022. Britain is losing more and more of its own citizens—and emigration has been concentrated among young adults.

When a country consistently makes life more difficult for the young—through unaffordable housing, high taxes, stagnant wages, poor quality public services, and a labor market that offers few opportunities—some will simply decide to leave. And the people who leave are often the very people Britain should most want to keep: entrepreneurs, parents, developers, and others who believe in hard work and self-improvement.

As Harrison Griffiths, a 25-year-old who left for Serbia in 2024, describes them, they are "people who have the agency to take control of their life, get off Stagnation Island, and go and do something better."

'Cash Cows for Entitled Pensioners'

"Young people are like every other generation of young people, just trying to figure out the world and determine their place in it and build their life in it," says Griffiths. He grew up in Evesham, a medieval market town in Worcestershire, and studied at the University of Exeter.

Griffiths, a policy professional, sees his decision to leave Britain as part of a new kind of British emigration enabled by remote work. "If you have the ability to work remotely," he says, you can "go and live in a place where cost of living is cheap, tax low." For that group, Britain is no longer the default place to build a life; it is merely one option among many.

Choosing to move to Serbia was, he admits, "quite a rogue decision." But in ordinary life, he says, it feels less suffocating than Britain. In the U.K., the government has a tendency to "tax, ban, and direct" many of the small pleasures Griffiths enjoys. "I like a drink, I like a cigarette, I like to vape," he says. In Belgrade, he can sit inside a bar with a pint that costs "something like three euros," smoke, vape, and enjoy his life. "These things just in one's day-to-day life feel a little bit more free," he says, "and you feel a little bit less bothered by nannying, tinkering politicians."

Housing was also a major factor in Griffiths' decision to leave Britain. In Belgrade, he has a nice two-bedroom apartment in a good part of the city. In London he paid about the same in rent, but had to live with four friends "in a bedroom that didn't really have a window."

It wasn't just the high price of........

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