A non-dom is someone tax-resident in one country while legally domiciled in another — a status that, in a handful of jurisdictions, taxes local income in full but shelters foreign income and gains unless that money is remitted locally.
In plain terms
It’s a residency-plus-origin distinction: a person can live somewhere without being treated as truly from there, and a few countries use that gap to attract wealthy arrivals by leaving the fortune they already had out of the local tax net. The United Kingdom built the best-known modern version of this and dismantled it in 2025. The concept isn’t dead everywhere, though — a handful of smaller jurisdictions still run some version of the same trade, usually priced as a flat annual charge rather than left open-ended.
How it works
The UK was the reference case. A UK resident who was non-UK-domiciled could elect the “remittance basis”: pay UK tax in full on UK-source income, but pay UK tax on foreign income and gains only to the extent that money was physically brought into the country. Long-term users paid an annual Remittance Basis Charge, which scaled up with years of UK residence before the regime ended. The UK abolished non-dom status entirely from 6 April 2025, replacing it with the Foreign Income and Gains (FIG) regime, which gives new UK residents full relief on foreign income and gains, but only for their first four years of residence, with no remittance-basis option afterward.
Other jurisdictions still run a live, functioning version of the old arrangement. Ireland continues to tax its own non-domiciled residents on the remittance basis for foreign income, while using a separate instrument — the domicile levy — to catch the opposite case: an Irish-domiciled person who tries to shed Irish tax residency while still holding substantial Irish wealth. Irish Revenue’s guidance on Part 18C sets out that levy’s terms.
The numbers
- UK non-dom regime abolished: 6 April 2025, replaced by the Foreign Income and Gains regime, which runs for four years from first UK residence.
- UK’s old Remittance Basis Charge, before abolition: tiered up to £60,000 a year for the longest-resident non-doms.
- Ireland’s domicile levy, still in force for 2026: €200,000 a year, owed by an Irish-domiciled individual who holds Irish-located capital over €5 million and worldwide income over €1 million, and who pays less than €200,000 in ordinary Irish income tax for the year.
What people get wrong
People assume a “domicile levy” is the price a non-dom pays for the status. It’s the opposite: Ireland’s domicile levy targets people trying to shed Irish tax residency entirely while remaining domiciled and wealthy there — a backstop against leaving, not a toll for arriving. The two mechanisms sit on either side of the same domicile concept but solve opposite problems, and conflating them is the most common mistake in casual writing about the term. The other frequent error is treating “non-dom” as a single, portable status; each country that still offers one defines domicile, the remittance rules, and the charge differently, and a status recognized in one jurisdiction carries no weight in another.
Related
Read more: Residency and Citizenship: Why the Wealthy Buy Options Across Borders · Offshore: Tax Havens, Shell Companies, and the Panama Papers
See also: Domicile vs residency · Expatriation / exit tax · Golden visa