A record 142,000 millionaires are relocating internationally in 2025. If your client serves wealthy customers, the audience they were talking to in 2022 is not the audience they are talking to today — and not the audience they will be talking to in 2027. The implications for PR targeting, media buying, partnerships, and brand strategy are immediate.
We just published The Haute Jets Wealth Migration Report with our partner Haute Jets. The headline number is 142,000 — the projected international millionaire relocations this year. It is the largest single-year figure ever recorded, up from 134,000 last year. It will reach 165,000 by 2026. And most PR firms servicing luxury, finance, real estate, hospitality, and private aviation clients are still using a 2020 audience map.
The old map read: New York and London are where wealthy audiences live. Miami, Aspen, and the Hamptons are where they vacation. Dubai is a growth market. Zurich is old money.
The new map, as of 2025, reads very differently:
- London is hemorrhaging wealth. –16,500 millionaires leaving in 2025 alone, thelargest single-year exodus from any country on record. $91.8 billion in wealth walking out.
- Dubai is not a growth market. It is the #1 global wealth destination, for the fourth straight year. Its millionaire population doubled in a decade.
- Miami is not a vacation destination. It is a primary residence. Miami-Dade added 50% more millionaires over the past decade. Citadel moved global HQ there. Thoma Bravo, Point72, Apollo, Blackstone, and Banco Santander are all expanding. Miami Alts Week draws 6,000 people a year.
- West Palm Beach is the fastest-growing luxury real estate market in the country. Luxury prices up 187% in a decade. Not Aspen. Not the Hamptons. West Palm Beach.
- Zurich and Zug are absorbing crypto millionaires — 241,700 of them globally, a new and distinct demographic that did not exist as a PR audience three years ago.
Why this matters for PR
Every PR plan is built on an assumption about where the audience physically lives, where they consume media, and what events they attend. When 142,000 wealthy people relocate in a single year — with their cash, their spend, their political influence, and their media consumption patterns — those assumptions break.
A few concrete implications:
Earned media targeting. If a luxury brand has been heavily invested in UK national media for the past decade, what percentage of their actual UHNWI audience is still reading The Times from London? The answer in 2025 is meaningfully lower than it was in 2022. Robb Report and Haute Living now reach higher concentrations of thewealthy-American-in-Florida audience than traditional coastal broadsheets.
Event strategy. Cannes and Art Basel Switzerland still matter. But Miami Art Week, Miami Alts Week, Formula 1 Miami Grand Prix, and the Dubai Air Show have become unavoidable. Private aviation data confirms it — Miami and Dubai private jet activity are at record volumes.
Partnership selection. If a brand partners on gifting, placement, or activation, partnering with platforms that already own the multi-home UHNW audience is higher-leverage than building reach from scratch. Haute Living has been doing that for two decades, which is why the Haute Jets partnership on this research exists.
Crisis preparedness. When a regulatory change in one country drives 16,500 wealthy families out in a year, that is a crisis communications event for every brand that was built around serving them in that country. The firms ahead of this have already moved staffing, media relationships, and account teams to follow themigration. The firms behind it are defending lost revenue in shrinking markets.
The crypto wealth class
The single biggest new demographic in the report is the crypto wealth class. Per Henley's Crypto Wealth Report 2025, 241,700 individuals globally now hold over $1 million in crypto. 145,100 of them are Bitcoin millionaires. 450 hold over $100 million. 36 are billionaires. 94% are under 40.
This cohort does not behave like traditional HNWIs. They do not respond to traditional private banking relationships. They relocate based on tax structure. They prefer Dubai, Singapore, Portugal, Switzerland, and Puerto Rico. They fly private at increasing rates — Royal Jet in Dubai specifically flagged young crypto millionaires as a growth segment in Henley’s report.
Most luxury brand PR plans still treat this cohort as irrelevant or as a niche. That is a 2022 position. In 2025, the crypto wealth class is approximately the size of the entire UHNW class from a decade ago. Ignoring it is a choice.
What PR firms need to do now
Three moves.
First, reread the audience brief. If a luxury client's brief still talks about their customer as living in New York, London, and San Francisco, it is out of date. The2026 brief needs to include Miami, Palm Beach, Dubai, Riyadh, Zug, Milan, Monaco, and Singapore. Without an accurate audience map, every downstream decision — media targeting, partnership, event calendar, spokesperson selection — is wrong.
Second, build the research capability to defend those decisions. Clients no longer accept directional strategy. They want data, sourced to third parties, that defends every recommendation. This is why we publish research like this report. The40+ linked sources in this 50-page document are the same sources we use to build luxury client strategy behind the scenes. Making that research public is a service to the industry and to our own accountability.
Third, stop treating wealth migration as an adjacency. It is the biggest demographic story in luxury, financial services, real estate, and private aviation for the rest of the decade. Every brand plan for 2026 should have a wealth migration section. If your agency is not giving you one, ask why.
What is coming
The full Haute Jets Wealth Migration Report is free, no registration, 50 pages, 40+ linked sources. It covers global migration flows, the UK exodus, the crypto wealth class, US interstate migration, Miami as Wall Street South, luxury real estate in every major destination, family offices, the multi-home reality, private aviation volume and market structure, tax policy drivers, and the sustainability tension in private aviation.
It is the audience map for every PR firm working in luxury and its adjacent categories. Read it. Use it. Update your client briefs accordingly. The firms that get ahead of this demographic shift in 2026 will outperform the ones that do not.
Ronn Torossian is Founder and Chairman of 5W Public Relations, one of the largest independently owned PR firms in the United States.
