Key takeaways
- No UK government has proposed a wealth tax. On 17 July 2026 the Chartered Institute of Taxation recorded that Andy Burnham had refused to rule one out and had not proposed one.
- Under the 2% charge above £10m that campaigners back, a £12m net worth faces £40,000 a year, £25m faces £300,000 and £100m faces £1.8m.
- The Wealth Tax Commission needed 1.12% above £10m to raise £9.9bn a year from 22,000 people in its 2020 model. Scaled to 2%, that is roughly £17.7bn, not £24bn.
- HMRC scores a 10 point rise in the higher capital gains tax rate at minus £3,565m by 2028 to 2029, a loss to the exchequer rather than a yield.
- Only four OECD countries still levied an annual tax on individual net wealth in 2017, down from 12 in 1990.
There is no UK wealth tax proposal on the statute book
You want to know what the UK wealth tax proposal would cost you, and what it would raise. Here is the honest answer to the first half: there isn't one.
No government has published a wealth tax. No Budget has legislated one. No Treasury costing of one exists. What exists is a campaign with a specific rate, a Chancellor with a Budget to write, and a Prime Minister who hasn't ruled anything out.
The Budget date is settled. On 31 July 2026 the Chancellor, John Healey, wrote to the Treasury Select Committee that "today I have asked the Office for Budget Responsibility to prepare an economic and fiscal forecast for publication on 28 October 2026. This will be accompanied by the Budget." That date is a fact. Its contents are not.
What Andy Burnham said about a UK wealth tax
Asked directly about a wealth tax in an interview with the podcaster and former footballer Gary Lineker, Burnham said: "I'm not going to rule things out right now." He added that "we need a greater sense of fairness" in the tax system. The Chartered Institute of Taxation reported both on 17 July 2026, the day he was confirmed as Labour leader, and drew the line carefully: "Burnham has refused to rule out introducing a 'wealth tax'. However neither has he specifically proposed one".
That distinction does real work. Refusing to rule something out isn't a proposal, and a campaign group's arithmetic isn't a Treasury costing.
Why the wealth tax UK debate in 2026 lands on 2% above £10m
The closest thing to a UK wealth tax proposal with numbers attached comes from two campaign organisations, and both use the same design.
Tax Justice UK published it on 8 July 2025 as one of ten reforms: "A 2% wealth tax on assets over £10 million", which it said would raise "up to £24 billion a year" from "the country's 20,000 richest people". The same package puts £12bn a year on capital gains reform and £10.2bn on charging national insurance to investment income.
Patriotic Millionaires UK commissioned Survation to poll 511 UK-based millionaires and published the result on 5 June 2025. It found "80% of millionaires support a two percent tax on wealth over £10 million - with only 8% against it". Among those who would actually pay it, support was higher still: "Of the millionaires polled who would have to pay the proposed wealth tax (those with wealth of £10m plus) - 85% of them were in support of it."
Neither revenue figure is a government estimate. Both come from organisations campaigning for the tax. That doesn't make them wrong, and the polling is a real poll with a named pollster and a stated sample. It does mean the £24bn needs testing against something independent.
The annual bill at £11m, £25m and £100m
A threshold tax only charges the slice above the threshold. On this design the first £10m is free, and everything above it pays 2% a year. The Commission described a threshold tax the same way, charging "only on the value of wealth above that threshold". One line of arithmetic gives you the bill.
| Net worth | Taxable slice above £10m | Annual bill at 2% | Bill as a share of total net worth |
|---|---|---|---|
| £11m | £1m | £20,000 | 0.18% |
| £12m | £2m | £40,000 | 0.33% |
| £25m | £15m | £300,000 | 1.20% |
| £50m | £40m | £800,000 | 1.60% |
| £100m | £90m | £1,800,000 | 1.80% |
The chart above plots four of those bills. The shape is the finding: the charge is almost nothing just above the threshold and compounds quickly beyond it.
The right-hand column is the part the headline rate hides. At £11m the effective rate on total net worth is 0.18%. At £100m it is 1.80%, ten times as much. The stated rate is 2% in both cases.
The charge also lands on assets rather than on income, by design. The Wealth Tax Commission rejected any adjustment for income: "if a wealth tax is desirable, its distinctive feature is raising revenue from those who hold wealth that is large in relation to their income."
How a wealth tax is calculated, and why the threshold does most of the work
The base is simple to state. The Commission defined it in one sentence: "By 'net wealth', we mean a person's assets minus their debts." Broad-based means nearly everything, because "A one-off wealth tax should include all property of an individual in the tax base."
Three design choices then decide who pays what, and none of them appears in the campaign headline.
The first is the unit of assessment. The Commission recommended the individual: "The tax should be levied on an individual rather than on a household basis". On a £10m individual threshold, a couple holding £9m each pays nothing, while one person holding £12m pays £40,000.
The second is valuation. Cash, listed shares and pensions are straightforward. Private companies are not, because "Shares in private companies would require professional valuation." Housing and land would go to the Valuation Office Agency, and the Commission noted that HMRC "does not currently have records on the value of individual properties."
The third is liquidity, the asset-rich and cash-poor problem. At a £2m threshold and a 0.6% rate, the Commission's modelling found that "44,000 people (7% of those paying) would be liquidity constrained". A £10m threshold shrinks that count, since larger portfolios hold more that can be sold. It doesn't remove it. A 2% charge on an illiquid holding still has to be funded from somewhere, every year.
The Commission's own model does not reach £24bn at 2%
The only independent costing of a UK wealth tax at this threshold is the Wealth Tax Commission's, published on 9 December 2020 by Arun Advani, Emma Chamberlain and Andy Summers, with the revenue modelling by Advani, Hughson and Tarrant.
Its annual-tax table works backwards from a £10bn revenue target. Above a £10m individual threshold, the rate needed was 1.12%. That raised £9.9bn a year on a low-avoidance assumption and £8.7bn on a high one, from 22,000 people.
A flat rate above a threshold scales with the rate: on the same base, twice the rate raises roughly twice as much. Scaling 1.12% up to 2% gives about £17.7bn a year, or £15.5bn on the high-avoidance assumption. The campaign figure is £24bn, about £6bn above the top of that range.
Two forces pull that comparison in opposite directions, and both belong on the page. The base is 2020 wealth, and wealth has grown since, which pushes the yield up. Avoidance rises with the rate, which pushes it down. The Commission measured the second: evidence from countries with annual wealth taxes suggests 7% to 17% of the initial tax base would be lost to avoidance at a 1% rate. At 2% the loss would be larger than the one priced into the 1.12% row, so straight-line scaling is an upper bound on its own terms.
The Commission also reached a conclusion the campaign tends not to quote. Its recommendation was that "instead of an annual wealth tax, the government should reform existing taxes on wealth." An annual wealth tax, in its view, "would only be justified in addition to these reforms if the aim was specifically to reduce inequality by redistributing wealth."
What capital gains tax and inheritance tax raise instead
Reforming what already exists is the alternative, and HMRC publishes a ready reckoner of what rate changes raise. The June 2025 edition is uncomfortable reading for that plan.
Raising the higher capital gains tax rate by 1 percentage point scores minus £15m in 2026 to 2027 and minus £30m in 2028 to 2029. Raise it by 5 points and the 2028 to 2029 figure is minus £870m. Raise it by 10 points and it is minus £3,565m. The negative signs mean a loss to the exchequer, not a gain. HMRC's own note 14 explains it: "Very large tax rate rises can reduce exchequer yield due to taxpayer behavioural impacts."
That is a forecast rather than a measurement, and it rests on an elasticity estimated from HMRC data. But it is the government's own arithmetic, and it is why whether capital gains tax would rise in the Budget is a harder question than the headline rate suggests.
Inheritance tax behaves differently. A 1 point rise in the standard rate scores plus £290m by 2028 to 2029. For scale, inheritance tax charged £7.03bn across 30,400 estates in the 2023 to 2024 tax year, which was 4.72% of UK deaths. Just 220 of those estates were worth more than £10m. Capital gains tax took £24.2bn from 584,000 taxpayers in 2024 to 2025, and 45% of that came from people making gains of £5m or more.
Now set the campaign's £24bn beside those. It is the entire capital gains tax take, or more than three times inheritance tax, collected from 22,000 people instead of 584,000. Put the other way round: inheritance tax reached 220 estates above £10m in a whole tax year, where an annual wealth tax would bill 22,000 people every year. The inheritance tax threshold and the published UK investment tax rates and allowances show how much machinery is already pointed at wealth.
Most countries that tried an annual wealth tax stopped
The strongest objection isn't British. The OECD counted the retreat: "While 12 countries had net wealth taxes in 1990, there were only four OECD countries that still levied recurrent taxes on individuals' net wealth in 2017."
The stated reasons were practical, not ideological. "Decisions to repeal net wealth taxes have often been justified by efficiency and administrative concerns and by the observation that net wealth taxes have frequently failed to meet their redistributive goals."
Where they survived, they raised little. In 2016 revenue from individual net wealth taxes "ranged from 0.2% of GDP in Spain to 1.0% of GDP in Switzerland". As a share of total tax revenue it "ranged from 0.5% in France to 3.7% in Switzerland". Switzerland is the outlier, with comparatively low thresholds and a broad base.
The counter-case to the counter-case is real too. The OECD argued "there is a strong case for addressing wealth inequality through the tax system", and that a net wealth tax is easier to justify "in the absence of broad-based personal capital income taxes and taxes on wealth transfers". The UK has both, and it has council tax as well. On the OECD's own framework, that weakens rather than strengthens the case for adding a wealth tax here, which is the same place the Wealth Tax Commission landed from UK evidence alone.
Nobody can currently measure UK wealth above £10m
Every estimate above rests on survey data whose own publisher has flagged it. The Office for National Statistics withdrew the badge from its own source: "Accreditation of the Wealth and Assets Survey has been suspended from Round 8, covering the period 2020-2022 onwards while we undertake further work to improve quality".
That survey is where the distribution comes from. Over April 2020 to March 2022, median household total wealth in Great Britain was £293,700. "The wealthiest 10% of households had household wealth of £1,200,500 or more". The wealthiest 1% "held 10% of all household wealth in Great Britain, which was the same as the proportion held by the least wealthy 50% of households combined".
Notice the gap. The top decile begins at about £1.2m. A £10m threshold sits an order of magnitude above anything a household survey measures well, and the Commission said so plainly: the data comes mainly from the Wealth and Assets Survey, "but this appears to be missing wealth at the top." It patched the gap with the Sunday Times Rich List, called that list "far from complete", and wrote that its one-off wealth tax numbers "should be considered a definite lower bound".
Composition matters as much as totals. Across the survey, net property wealth was 40% of household wealth and private pension wealth 35%, with net financial wealth at 14% and physical wealth at 10%. Three quarters of British household wealth sits in houses and pensions, which are exactly the holdings an annual valuation struggles with.
What would change these numbers
A threshold other than £10m. The Commission's table shows how fast the base widens. Dropping to £5m takes the payer count from 22,000 to 83,000; at £2m it is 626,000. A threshold moved down reaches far further than the rate alone suggests, which is why the threshold, not the rate, is the number to watch.
A household basis rather than an individual one. Every figure here assumes the individual threshold the Commission recommended. A £10m household threshold would catch couples that an individual one misses, and the 22,000 count would rise.
Better data on the top. The Commission asked for exactly that, recommending "significantly increased investment of resource in wealth data and analysis by ONS and HMRC." Until the Wealth and Assets Survey regains accreditation, every costing of a wealth tax UK proposal rests on a survey its own publisher has flagged, patched with a newspaper rich list.
The thing to watch on 28 October 2026 isn't whether the words "wealth tax" are said. It is whether the Budget moves capital gains tax, inheritance tax or council tax bands, because that is the route the Commission recommended, and two of those three are already priced in HMRC’s ready reckoner. A wealth tax would need a national valuation system the UK does not have. Changing the existing taxes needs a rate line. One of those rate lines already exists: the high value council tax surcharge adds £2,500 to £7,500 a year to English homes worth £2 million or more from April 2028.