TAX EFFICIENCY TOKEN

An educational estimate of what is left after tax and costs on a disposal. It uses the headline rate for the jurisdiction and activity you choose. It does not know your brackets, allowances, losses or personal circumstances, so treat it as an illustration, not a tax computation.

Every jurisdiction on this globe is a bundle of defaults. Higher tax buys things automatically. Near-zero tax hands you more capital, but only under conditions — and the conditions are where relocation plans usually fail.

You may be about to make a decision worth a great deal of money. You are entitled to know exactly how these numbers were produced and where they stop being reliable.

WHAT THE EFFICIENCY INDEX IS

A 0–100 score computed only across the dimensions you tick. Each dimension's headline rate is divided by a ceiling drawn from the highest rate in the dataset, capped at 1, and averaged. 100 means nothing you ticked is taxed. It is a comparison aid, not a calculation of what you would owe. It deliberately ignores allowances, brackets, deductions, treaty relief and your actual numbers, because those cannot be generalised across 138 jurisdictions.

WHY TRADING STYLE CHANGES THE ANSWER

Most jurisdictions apply an entirely different regime to a passive holder than to someone trading frequently, with leverage, or through automation. The distinction is usually decided case by case on frequency, holding period, leverage, and what share of your net worth sits in the asset. This is the largest single source of error in public "tax-free country" lists, so it is a control here rather than a footnote.

WHY RESIDENCY ACCESS IS RANKED ALONGSIDE RATE

A 0% rate you cannot lawfully reach is worth nothing. Ties break toward the more obtainable residency. The access rating reflects cost, presence burden and restrictions for someone who needs a permit — EU and EEA citizens can disregard it for EU destinations.

The access rating is an editorial assessment, not a sourced figure. Unlike the tax rates it is not drawn from any authority; it is a judgement about how realistically an ordinary applicant with means could obtain and maintain residency. It sits beside the rates and should not be read as carrying the same evidentiary weight. It affects ordering only, never the tax figures themselves.

WHAT CHANGED GLOBALLY IN 2026

Two shifts run underneath almost every entry. Reporting: 48 countries began collecting Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework data on 1 January 2026, with the first international exchange due in 2027, and multilateral crypto tax data-sharing now covers more than 60 economies. DAC8 applies across the EU from the same date. The practical effect is that undeclared holdings stop being invisible from 2027, independent of any rate. Venue conditionality: a growing group of jurisdictions now ties the tax outcome to where you trade rather than what you hold. Thailand exempts gains only on trades made through SEC-licensed exchanges, brokers or dealers (Ministerial Regulation No. 399, income received 2025 to 2029); Indonesia levies a final 0.21% of transaction value through OJK-licensed domestic platforms against 1% through foreign ones (PMK 50/2025); Kenya charges 10% excise duty on the fees virtual-asset service providers collect (Finance Act 2025); and Kazakhstan's decree of 7 July 2026 opens voluntary disclosure of crypto held on foreign platforms on condition that it is moved to licensed domestic providers by the end of 2026, with a personal income tax exemption for 2026 to 2028 on trades through those providers directed into legislation. In those countries the choice of exchange is now part of the tax question.

THE SEPTEMBER 2026 VERIFICATION SWEEP

Every jurisdiction on this map carries a provenance note stating how it was checked. All 138 were examined in every displayed dimension against current sources, one figure at a time, and each figure was classified as verified without change, corrected, disclosed as a genuine legal uncertainty, or marked indicative. Crypto: 21 corrected, 20 disclosed as uncertain. Personal income: 33 corrected. Wealth: 2 corrected. Property: 50 corrected and one figure, Botswana, left indicative because the current local rate schedule could not be retrieved. Uncertainty is shown on the card rather than resolved into a number.

Errors clustered in two places: regimes that changed effective 1 January 2026, and cases where a mechanism was mis-modelled rather than a number being stale. The second kind is the more dangerous, because no amount of rate-checking finds it. The Netherlands was the clearest instance — a 36% charge on a deemed return was being presented as a 36% tax on gains.

A pattern worth stating plainly: on crypto and income, most corrections ran in the same direction. Cyprus moved from 0% to 8%, Slovakia from 7% to 35%, Nigeria lost its flat 10%, Mauritius gained a 35% band, Uruguay's territorial rule stopped covering foreign financial yields. Stale data flatters low-tax jurisdictions, because the reforms of the last two years have mostly tightened. Any comparison site that has not been re-checked recently is likely to be optimistic rather than merely old. Property was the exception: most of its corrections moved figures down, because land-only, cadastral, rental-value and per-square-metre systems had been shown as if they were percentages of market value. Those are now translated to a representative share of market value and say so on the card.

SOURCING AND VERIFICATION

Figures are compiled from published tax-authority guidance and professional tax-advisory summaries, and cross-checked between independent sources before entry. Wherever possible a figure was checked against the statute itself or the tax authority's own guidance; the rest rest on professional summaries, cross-checked, which is the normal basis for comparative tax data and the reason every figure carries a confidence level. Where reputable sources conflicted, the jurisdiction was flagged on its own page or excluded, never silently resolved in favour of one number.

High confidence: a full profile with corroborating independent sources and a stable regime. Medium: a headline profile, or a full profile in a regime that has changed recently enough to still be moving. Low: treatment undefined in law, in active transition, or reported inconsistently. An absence of rules is not the same as a favourable rule, and low confidence usually indicates the former.

Confidence reflects the September 2026 review, in which every displayed figure was individually classified and the classification recorded for its jurisdiction. It indicates how much corroboration a figure has and whether it rests on primary or professional sources; a figure marked indicative is one where the mechanism is verified but the current rate could not be retrieved.

CITIZENSHIP

Residency changes your tax; citizenship is whether you can ever belong there. They are separate lines on every page so that "citizenship in five years" is never read as "tax residency in five years". The citizenship line gives the statutory residence period before naturalisation, the shorter path by marriage where one exists, the time to a passport as residence plus published processing time, whether dual nationality is permitted, and whether a citizenship-by-investment route exists and at what published minimum. It is information about the rule, not a promise about your case: eligibility is individual, every grant is discretionary somewhere in the chain, and a period counted in years of "lawful residence" can be reset by absence. It is never part of the efficiency index. Every entry names its source and the quarter and month it was verified; an entry without a verified source is not shown at all.

KNOWN GAPS

Jurisdictions are added only when their rates can be sourced, not to inflate a count. Currently uncovered and worth knowing about: the Marshall Islands and Palau, both used as corporate domiciles; Tonga, Tuvalu and Niue, reported at 0% by aggregators but not corroborated here; Sint Maarten, Montserrat and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines; and the US Virgin Islands, whose Economic Development Commission programme offers a large tax reduction to qualifying businesses. Sub-national variation remains a gap outside the United States: Swiss cantons and Spanish autonomous communities can move a personal outcome further than a change of country and are not yet covered. All 51 US states are.

COVERAGE TIERS

Not every jurisdiction is researched to the same depth, and pretending otherwise would be the dishonest option. Full profile jurisdictions carry verified rates across all four dimensions plus residency routes and departure obstacles. Headline profile jurisdictions carry verified headline rates and a shorter dossier. Every country page states which it is. Where a jurisdiction is not covered at all, the globe shows it as unmapped rather than inventing a rate for it.

REVIEW CYCLE

The dataset is re-checked quarterly. This edition was reviewed in ; the next scheduled review is . Tax law does not wait for review cycles, so a rate can change after a review. Every page carries the date it was last checked, so you always know how current the figure in front of you is.

SOURCES AND CURRENCY

Compiled from public tax-authority guidance and professional advisory summaries, reviewed September 2026. Headline figures are generally top marginal rates. Several regimes moved materially in 2025–2026 alone: UK non-dom abolition, Portugal's replacement of NHR with IFICI, Puerto Rico's Act 60 amendment, and CARF crypto reporting entering force across dozens of jurisdictions.

WHAT THIS IS NOT

This is information, not advice. The distinction is exact: information tells you what a jurisdiction does; advice tells you what to do about it. Every figure here is accurate for the jurisdiction as of the date on its page, except where it is explicitly marked indicative. What no reference can supply is the second thing — what these rules mean for you, given your citizenship, your residency history, where your income is sourced, how your activity would be classed, and what applies on the way out. Those are decisions, and decisions belong with an advisor who knows your facts.

OFFICIAL CHANNELS

The only official account for this project is @TETatlas on X. Any other account using this name, logo or wordmark is not affiliated with it, and this page is the reference: if a handle is not listed here, it is not official. Nothing will ever be requested by direct message, and no announcement will be made anywhere that is not also stated here.

INDEPENDENCE

No advertisers, no sponsored jurisdictions, no paid placement. Rankings come from the dataset and your inputs alone.