Countries With No Income Tax: the List, and What It Leaves Out

Nineteen countries levy no personal income tax at all. That is a fact, it is verifiable, and you will find it on a hundred pages.

What you will not find there is that those nineteen countries run from first place to the 75th in our ranking. A chasm, between two countries showing the very same zero.

Why 0% does not mean 0

A zero income tax says nothing about the two other levies a newcomer bears: VAT on what they spend, and corporate tax if they have a company.

Look at the ends of the list:

All four show "no income tax". The first levies nothing at all; the last levies 17% VAT and a third of profits. A list sorted on income tax alone puts them in the same box, and that is exactly the information someone moving needs.

And Monaco has one more trap: the 1963 treaty sends French nationals back to French tax. A French person moving to Monaco stays taxed in France, unless they lived there before 1957.

The list, in the order of what a newcomer actually bears

The six tied at the top, with zero on everything or nearly: Anguilla, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Pitcairn, Turks and Caicos, the British Virgin Islands.

The Gulf, just behind: Bahamas and Bahrain at 9.3, Qatar rank 9th, the UAE rank 14th, Kuwait rank 15th, Brunei rank 20th, Oman rank 21th.

The Pacific: Niue rank 10th, Vanuatu rank 13th.

And the tail, where VAT and corporate tax take back what income tax does not: Saudi Arabia rank 37th, Antigua and Barbuda rank 51th, Monaco rank 60th, St Kitts and Nevis rank 75th.

Oman leaves the list on 1 January 2028

This is the item we saw nowhere else, and it dates every list written this year.

Royal Decree 56/2025 creates an Omani income tax of 5%, applying from 1 January 2028, on the portion of annual income above 42,000 Omani rials, about EUR 100,000. It is the first income tax in the Gulf.

Two readings, and both matter:

• For an ordinary reader it changes almost nothing. The Omani administration estimates around 1% of the population will be affected, and everything below the threshold stays exempt. Oman will remain far below European tax levels.
• For planning it changes everything. The idea that the Gulf will never tax income has just been given an expiry date. A country with no income tax today can have one the year after next, and you will already have moved.

The problem the lists never raise: getting in

The top six are top because they levy nothing. They are also, for the most part, places you do not move to.

Pitcairn has about forty inhabitants, no airport, and is reached by ship from New Zealand over several days. The others want money: on the order of USD 150,000 as a donation for Anguilla, USD 750,000 for the Bahamas, 2.4 million for the Caymans, 2.5 million for Bermuda.

The only genuinely practicable routes for a normally wealthy person are the UAE, with a residence visa tied to a job, a company or a property investment, and Qatar, whose programme is newer. That is why Dubai is the destination everyone talks about while ranking only 14th: it is the best placed one you can actually go to.

One of the competing articles we read counts Somalia and Western Sahara among its "tax-free countries". It is not strictly wrong. It is simply unrelated to the reader's question.

What does not work

Buying a passport. Antigua and St Kitts sell citizenship, not tax residency. A passport gives mobility; it changes nothing about which state taxes you. And both sit in the bottom half of this list, with 15% and 17% VAT.

Leaving without leaving. A zero-tax country protects you from nothing while your home, your activity or the centre of your economic interests stays in your country of origin. See the best countries to move to.

Forgetting the exit. Several countries tax unrealised gains on departure. The French exit tax deferral is automatic towards the EU and EEA; towards a third state, and all of these are, only if that state has signed with France both an administrative assistance convention and an assistance-in-recovery convention. Otherwise: application, tax representative, guarantees, and 90 days' notice.

So, where?

The full ranking gives all 217 countries, and the FiScore page explains the calculation.

Sources

Each country's rate comes from its own page, with its source and verification date. For Oman: Royal Decree 56/2025. Seven countries on this list have no primary source with us yet; their zero is universally accepted but we prefer to say so. Checked in August 2026.

This page informs, it does not advise. A move to a zero-tax country is prepared before, not after: have it looked at, as our terms say.