Malta Tax Guide: What Expats Actually Pay

Malta sits 193rd out of 217 in our world ranking, with a FiScore of 3.7 out of 10. On paper it is a heavily taxed country: 35% at the top of the personal scale, 35% on companies. And yet it is one of the most sought-after bases in Europe for people who want to pay less tax.

Both things are true at once, and that is the whole story. The headline rate is not the rate anyone pays. Here is what you would actually pay, and what it takes.

Start with the scale

If you become a Maltese tax resident and your income arises in Malta, this is the ladder:

Two other scales exist, one for married couples filing jointly and one for parents, both with wider lower bands. A family therefore pays less than a single person on the same income.

Nothing remarkable so far. It is an ordinary European scale, gentler than most at the bottom and comparable at the top. If you stop reading here, Malta is not interesting. What follows is the part that matters.

Resident, but not domiciled

Malta separates two ideas that most countries merge: residence and domicile.

You become tax resident by spending more than 183 days a year on the island. Domicile is a long-term concept inherited from English law: you acquire it by birth or by settling permanently, not by signing a lease. So almost everyone who moves to Malta is resident but not domiciled, the status everyone calls "non-dom".

The consequence is the heart of the matter:

• income arising in Malta is taxed normally, on the scale above;
• foreign income is taxed only if it is remitted to Malta, meaning brought into the country;
• foreign capital gains are not taxed at all, even when remitted.

This is the remittance basis. A dividend paid by a foreign company and left in an account outside Malta never enters the Maltese tax base.

Be careful with what counts as remitted, because the definition is broad. Paying your Maltese rent or your groceries with a card attached to a foreign account is a remittance. The mechanism works, but it has to be run properly rather than improvised.

The €5,000 minimum tax nobody advertises

Here is the point most guides skip, and the one that decides the question for a lot of people.

A resident non-domiciled individual with foreign income owes a minimum tax of €5,000 a year, whether or not that income is remitted. It is not an extra tax, it is a floor. If your normal calculation comes to more, you pay the calculation. If it comes to less, you still pay €5,000.

That floor changes the maths entirely depending on scale. On €500,000 of foreign dividends kept outside Malta, €5,000 is 1%, which is unbeatable. On €40,000, it is 12.5%, and the advantage has evaporated. Malta pays off above a certain volume, not below it.

The 5% company, and the small print

This is the other half of the island's reputation. It is real, but the route is indirect.

A Maltese company is taxed at 35%. When it then distributes a dividend, its non-resident or non-domiciled shareholder claims back part of the tax the company paid:

Three things to understand before getting excited.

The refund goes to the shareholder, not the company. The business really does pay out 35% in cash, and the money comes back afterwards, in practice within four to six weeks. You need the working capital to bridge that.

Substance is not optional. A letterbox with a director who has never set foot on the island will not survive a challenge from your home tax authority on permanent establishment or abuse of law. Real management, real decisions taken locally, real means. Without that, the structure is a risk, not a plan.

There is a ceiling. Since the global minimum tax came into force, groups with consolidated revenue above €750 million face a 15% floor. Below that threshold, which covers essentially everyone reading this page, the refund system is fully available.

If you are American, read this first

This is where most Malta guides written for a global audience mislead their readers.

The United States taxes its citizens on citizenship, not on residence. Moving to Malta does not end your US filing obligation, it adds a second one. You will still file a US return every year, still report foreign accounts, and still be subject to US rules on foreign companies, which treat a small Maltese holding company very differently from the way Malta treats it.

There is a US-Malta tax treaty, and there have been aggressive schemes built on it that the IRS has publicly listed as transactions of interest. That is not a reason to avoid Malta. It is a reason to have a US cross-border specialist involved from the start rather than after the fact.

If you are British, the timing is interesting

The UK ran its own non-dom regime for two centuries and abolished it in April 2025, replacing it with a time-limited regime for foreign income and gains. A great many people who had organised their affairs around British non-dom status suddenly needed somewhere else.

Malta still has the thing the UK gave up. Add the fact that English is an official language, that the legal system has common law roots, and that the flight is short, and the appeal is obvious.

The trap is the same as ever: leaving the UK is governed by the Statutory Residence Test, which counts days but also ties, and it does not care how you feel about where you live. Get the year of departure wrong and you are UK resident anyway.

What Malta does not take

The list is short but it matters, especially once wealth has accumulated:

• no wealth tax;
• no inheritance tax;
• no annual property tax.

Against that, VAT is 18%, and transfers of Maltese property attract stamp duty.

The drawbacks, because there are some

A guide that lists none is not doing its job.

It is an island of 316 km². Everything is expensive because everything is imported, property has risen a great deal, and the summer is punishing. That is not a tax question, it is a daily one.

Administration is slow. Opening a bank account takes weeks, sometimes months, and Maltese banks have become highly selective since the island's reputational episodes.

The country is watched closely. Malta is on neither the EU nor the OECD blacklist, which is good news. But it spent 2021 and 2022 on the FATF grey list, and scrutiny has stayed tight since. Expect to document the origin of your funds at length.

Information is exchanged automatically. Your Maltese account is reported to the tax authority of your home country. Banking secrecy does not exist here, and nobody serious will tell you otherwise.

So, who is Malta for?

• An entrepreneur with genuinely portable work: the best fit by far. A 5% effective company rate, non-dom treatment on what you pay yourself, and English as the working language.
• Someone with substantial investment income: yes, provided the income stays outside Malta. The €5,000 floor becomes trivial and foreign gains escape tax entirely.
• An employee of a Maltese company: no particular advantage. You pay the ordinary scale, up to 35%.
• Modest or middling income: the €5,000 floor eats the benefit. Look at other destinations, or stay where you are.

The full table of Maltese rates, with sources and the verification date, is on our Malta page. To put the island next to another country, the comparison tool does the arithmetic.

Sources

The figures on this page were verified in August 2026 against the Malta Tax and Customs Administration, PwC Tax Summaries and firms established on the island. Tax law moves fast: the update date is at the top of this article, and an error reported to us gets fixed.

This page informs, it does not advise. Before deciding anything, talk to a professional who will look at your situation, as our terms of use set out.