The Great British Exodus: Taxes, Housing Costs, and Terrible Healthcare Are Driving Young Brits Away

"I can't believe more people aren't doing it," says 28-year-old William Bowden. He relocated from the U.K. to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, last year. In Britain, "Nothing works as it should do. Even if it does work, you feel like you're getting ripped off—and then it's raining on top of that."

Bowden grew up in Leigh-on-Sea—a seaside town in Essex that was voted the second-happiest place to live in the East of England—situated about 45 minutes east of London by train. He lived with his mother and younger sister in a detached house, overlooking the banks of the Thames Estuary. After graduating from the University of Kent, he started working as a ship broker in London. He had what most people would consider a good job in the city, but it felt impossible to buy even a modest family home in the town he grew up in.

"For the majority of people in the U.K., buying a home is almost a pipe dream without parental assistance these days," he says. Even buying a three-bedroom semi-detached house on a U.K. salary with its high tax burden felt "a million miles away." About 52 percent of first-time buyers received assistance from the bank of mum and dad in 2024.

But after Bowden relocated to the Middle East, the calculation changed. Bowden was doing similar work, yet his salary went much further. He could live in an apartment with amenities that would have been unaffordable in London. The UAE does not levy a personal income tax on salaries or wages. "Even if I hadn't had a salary increase," Bowden says, "I'd be 30-40 percent better off."

The contrast was so stark that it changed his original plan. "When I first moved…I wanted to be [in Dubai] for three to five years, earn enough money to be able to start a family," and move back to the U.K. "I loved my upbringing [in Britain] and being around family," he says. But after spending a few months in Dubai, he realized starting a family would be far easier there. "I don't think, at this stage, my intention will be to come back to the United Kingdom anytime soon."

Bowden is one of more than 1.2 million British nationals who have left the United Kingdom since 2021. In 2025 alone, 246,000 Brits moved away from the country.

The vast majority of Brits leaving are not elderly pensioners seeking better weather in retirement. They are young, ambitious people who have decided they must exit Britain to achieve their personal and professional goals. Roughly two-thirds of British nationals who left the U.K. from April 2024 through March 2025 were ages 16–34, according to government data. The net loss in younger age groups has grown every year since 2022. Britain is losing more and more of its own citizens—and emigration has been concentrated among young adults.

When a country consistently makes life more difficult for the young—through unaffordable housing, high taxes, stagnant wages, poor quality public services, and a labor market that offers few opportunities—some will simply decide to leave. And the people who leave are often the very people Britain should most want to keep: entrepreneurs, parents, developers, and others who believe in hard work and self-improvement.

As Harrison Griffiths, a 25-year-old who left for Serbia in 2024, describes them, they are "people who have the agency to take control of their life, get off Stagnation Island, and go and do something better."

'Cash Cows for Entitled Pensioners'

"Young people are like every other generation of young people, just trying to figure out the world and determine their place in it and build their life in it," says Griffiths. He grew up in Evesham, a medieval market town in Worcestershire, and studied at the University of Exeter.

Griffiths, a policy professional, sees his decision to leave Britain as part of a new kind of British emigration enabled by remote work. "If you have the ability to work remotely," he says, you can "go and live in a place where cost of living is cheap, tax low." For that group, Britain is no longer the default place to build a life; it is merely one option among many.

Choosing to move to Serbia was, he admits, "quite a rogue decision." But in ordinary life, he says, it feels less suffocating than Britain. In the U.K., the government has a tendency to "tax, ban, and direct" many of the small pleasures Griffiths enjoys. "I like a drink, I like a cigarette, I like to vape," he says. In Belgrade, he can sit inside a bar with a pint that costs "something like three euros," smoke, vape, and enjoy his life. "These things just in one's day-to-day life feel a little bit more free," he says, "and you feel a little bit less bothered by nannying, tinkering politicians."

Housing was also a major factor in Griffiths' decision to leave Britain. In Belgrade, he has a nice two-bedroom apartment in a good part of the city. In London he paid about the same in rent, but had to live with four friends "in a bedroom that didn't really have a window."

It wasn't just the high price of housing that drove him out. It was his sense that the system was rigged against young people like him. "We are not just cash cows for entitled pensioners," he says.

Britain's economy has become defined by a gap between younger and older generations. The majority (61 percent) of Gen Z Brits feel that they have to work harder than their parents did at their age, according to a YouGov poll, and economic outcomes for younger and older Britons are diverging.

Wealth is growing increasingly quickly for older Brits—but declining for younger Brits. Median wealth for people in their 60s was 55 percent higher in 2018–2020 in real terms than for people in their 60s in 2006–2008. But for people in their 30s, median wealth was 34 percent lower. Median earnings for working 25-year-olds grew rapidly between the 1957–1961 generation (19,900 pounds per year in 2024–25 prices) and the 1977–1981 generation (28,500 pounds). But since the 2008 financial crisis, median earnings for working 25-year-olds have stagnated, with the 1997–2001 generation having a very similar level of pay (28,000 pounds) to that of those born two decades earlier. British people born in the late 1980s earned 8 percent less at the age of 30 than the generation born 10 years earlier at the same age, according to the Resolution Foundation's Intergenerational Audit 2023.

Nowhere is this generational divide more obvious than in housing. Britain has the worst housing shortage of any major developed nation, and decades of supply shortages have helped push house prices and rents far beyond the reach of ordinary young workers. In the late 1990s, the average home cost roughly three and a half times the average citizen's earnings. Today the average home in England costs 7.6 times average annual earnings there, while in London it costs more than 10 times average London earnings. Meanwhile, almost three-quarters of retired households now own their home outright—and with house prices soaring, this represents one of the greatest increases in private wealth in the country's history.

For young Britons, that creates a dark outlook. In 2000, 59 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds owned their home. By 2022–23, that had fallen to 39 percent. Millions are instead spending a large chunk of their salaries on rent, with private renters in England spending 34 percent of their income on housing costs alone. This is much higher than the 19 percent spent by those with mortgages.

Mouna Ramdani, 28, who left St. Albans for Dubai almost six years ago, also saw housing as part of a wider problem. Young people, she says, put themselves in "horrible situations" simply to move out of their parents' houses. In Britain, she felt she would either be stuck at home or wasting money on rent while drifting further away from homeownership. In Dubai, she could afford a lifestyle that's out of reach in London: an apartment with a view, amenities, and a sense of independence. "I can afford one of the nicest places here," she says. "But I cannot afford that in London."

Illustration: Mouna Ramdani; Sarat M/Fiverr

'For Family Life'

It's not just luxury amenities luring Britons away from home. It's the difficulty of starting a family in a country where housing is so expensive. That's made the U.S. an attractive option, at least for those who can get through the immigration process.

Carly Rolph, a 31-year-old mother originally from Louisiana, married a Brit, became a U.K. citizen, and had a couple of kids. But housing became a major factor in their feeling that the U.K. no longer worked for their family. Their mortgage payment doubled, and both Rolph and her husband were let go from their jobs.

"It's just starting to feel like we're just trying to make it work for no reason," she says. Rolph and her husband plan to move with their two young children to Louisiana, where they will be closer to her relatives and have greater opportunities. "I'm beside myself excited for the experiences that we can give them in the U.S.," she says, "simply because we can afford them."

The percentage of women in England and Wales who have not had a child by the age of 30 has skyrocketed, from 48 percent for those born in the late 1980s to 58 percent for those born in the early 1990s. The share of people who have not attended university in their mid- to late-20s living with parents has risen dramatically over the last 25 years, from 15 percent in the late 1990s to 26 percent in 2023–2024. Among them, around 86 percent were childless; 40 percent of the overall nine-percentage-point rise in childlessness can be explained by the shift toward living with parents, according to the Resolution Foundation.

The high cost of living in Britain has become an impossible burden for many families. Jason Kwao, 29, and his wife Sumekka felt like they were doing what they were supposed to do: working, earning, paying for childcare, and trying to build a life together. Kwao, who is from Croydon, a town in South London, was working long hours at an agency. His daughter spent much of her time in a childcare facility while he tried to keep up with work from the early morning until 8 or 9 in the evening. "I was burning that candle at both ends," he says, "and it still wasn't working."

By the time the family was reunited at the end of the day, everyone was exhausted. "There were moments where we barely had any money in the bank accounts, and we still had to pay rent," he remembers. At one point, he says, "I was literally crying, like, bills are due and we have no money."

Eventually, they decided to take a risk. They left Britain, moved abroad, and started building a business of their own. In Dubai, Kwao found not only a more attractive tax environment but a radically different model of family life. Rather than spending his days separated from his children and being exhausted by the time he came home, he could work from home, see his kids throughout the day, and build a life around his family. "For family life," says Kwao, the move was worth it. "That's the main reason."

Not even the U.K.'s "free" socialized healthcare through the National Health Service (NHS) could compete with that.

'Not the NHS That I Was Promised'

"Even with the NHS, if you're on a waiting list, you got [to wait] really long enough to be seen," Kwao says. "You know, there's lots of issues with it. I still prefer paying private, personally."

"The National Health Service is the closest thing the English have to a religion," former British Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson observed in 1992. Britain's socialized healthcare system has long been regarded as a source of national pride and thus politically untouchable. But the country has some of the longest medical waiting times in the developed world, and the socialized system performs poorly on almost all available measures of health outcomes. In 2019, the U.K. had a treatable mortality rate of 71 per 100,000—the lowest it had been since data began in 2001, yet still the highest treatable mortality rate in Western Europe.

Recently, more Brits have been waking up to the National Health Service's failures. In 2024, just one in five adults (21 percent) were "very" or "quite" satisfied with the way the NHS runs, a steep decline of 39 percentage points since 2019, according to the British Social Attitudes survey. It's the lowest level of satisfaction recorded since the survey began in 1983.

For Rolph, poor healthcare was a contributing factor in her family's decision to leave Britain. The breaking point came while she was pregnant with her second child. At her first ultrasound, doctors discovered what she describes as a "basketball-size growth" on her ovary. At first, she says, staff told her there was "nothing to worry about." Then she was told the growth was not benign and doctors would not know what it was until they had performed surgery to remove it.

"We had been told that it was an emergency surgery," Rolph says, and that if it happened later in the pregnancy, "my health would be put at risk" and "my baby's health would be put at risk."

But for the next four weeks, she says, the surgery was repeatedly canceled, sometimes the day before it was due to take place. While waiting, Rolph was placed in rooms with women who were actively miscarrying or being told that their pregnancies were ectopic, with little privacy. "It was so disorienting," she says.

After she finally had the operation, the treatment that followed was at times frightening. Rolph describes being left in severe pain after major surgery, having to ask repeatedly for her morphine pump to be refilled, and being told by one nurse that she needed to "get over it" and "be tough," even as doctors told her that failing to manage the pain could put her pregnancy at risk. After the surgery, she says, she was handed some medication and told she was responsible for keeping track of it herself. "I was there for five days, and I didn't shower. Nobody changed my bedding," she says.

"I experienced a lot of emotional and, to be quite honest, physical abuse at the hands of the NHS," she adds. "I would be lying if I said that it wasn't a major reason that we are looking to move abroad, because what we experienced was not the NHS that I was promised."

At one point, the experience became so frightening that it overturned one of the assumptions she had brought with her from America. "I got to a point where I would have happily gone into medical debt in the U.S. to avoid what happened to me in that situation."

'I Couldn't Find Anything in the U.K.'

Unfortunately, young Britons' economic woes do not stop there. According to the U.K.'s Office for National Statistics, more than a million (13.5 percent) 16- to 24-year-olds are not in education, employment, or training (NEET). Those who do work face a punitive tax system. In 2026, Britons will work 156 days for the taxman, with every penny the average person earns through June 5 going to taxes. A graduate in the lowest tax bracket earning over 28,470 pounds ($38,850) would keep 68 percent of every additional pound they earn after taxes, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. A higher-rate taxpayer would keep just 58 percent of every additional pound.

The British government recently hiked employment taxes, raised the legal minimum wage, and introduced expansive new labor market regulations. For example, the newly enacted Employment Rights Act will give all employees the right to file a lawsuit for unfair dismissal after six months of employment, among other costly "rights" that burden employers with red tape.

These policy changes have contributed to employers' general reluctance to hire young and inexperienced workers. Indeed, the government's own impact assessment estimates that the measures could cost businesses up to 5 billion pounds annually (about $6.8 billion), much of which is passed on to consumers through higher prices or to employees in the form of lower wages or less hiring.

Whatever the cause, Britain's labor market has become noticeably less welcoming to young workers. There are fewer job openings: Vacancies have fallen from 1.3 million in spring 2022 to around 705,000 in parts of 2026. Meanwhile, around 606,000—roughly one in nine—16- to 24-year-olds are not working and are receiving Universal Credit, a type of welfare benefit.

As the problems in the labor market worsen, more young people are facing long-term unemployment. Six in 10 young people who are NEET have never had a job. Many have simply given up, with 60 percent of young NEETs now economically inactive, meaning they are not just out of work but not looking for work.

For a generation already facing a higher cost of living and little prospect of homeownership, even simply getting a job is difficult.

The young Brits leaving the country are on the other side of the same broken bargain. They are strivers who look at Britain's stagnant economy, high rents, punitive taxes, and shrinking opportunities and decide they are unwilling to wait around for the country to change. While some young people are being pushed onto government benefits, others are being pushed out of the country.

This was Ramdani's experience. "I think the issue is, obviously, our economy," says Ramdani, "but also the lack of opportunity." In the U.K., she says, employers increasingly wanted "experience for entry-level roles." In Dubai, by contrast, "you can get an entry-level job being entry level." After moving, she started a women-only club, partly because she remembered how lonely it could feel to arrive in a new country. The group is now mostly British. "Every time we meet each other," she says, "we'll be like, 'Oh, where are you from?' It'll be somewhere in the U.K., and they'll be like, 'So glad I got out.'" Others tell her, "Thank goodness I found a job here, because I couldn't find anything in the U.K."

The first job Ramdani took in Dubai was low-paid, but it gave her a foothold. Within months, she had gone freelance, landed a major contract, and eventually built her own personal-branding agency. "I knew for a fact I was going to start my own business," she says, "and because I knew that, I knew that I didn't want to do that in the U.K."

She's not the only one.

'A Box in London'

The young Britons deciding to leave are not nearly wealthy enough to be considered tax exiles, but they are often entrepreneurial—and ambitious enough to be mobile.

According to the Dubai Chamber of Commerce, 2,733 new U.K. members joined the organization in 2025 alone, making Britain the fourth-largest source of new foreign businesses registering with the chamber. "In UAE, you've got a lot of young people that are coming over, starting businesses. You know, they've got a hustler's mentality, so they're willing to work," Kwao says. Now a millionaire, he says his new home country's tax system is a major part of the appeal: "If you're in the U.K., I think you definitely want to go ahead and experience what it's like to not pay any taxes."

Ramdani feels the same way. "I could start the business [in the U.K.], but I wouldn't be able to afford to have a business long term if I'm paying so much tax. It just didn't seem viable for me at the time," she says.

But the British expats leaving for greener pastures in Serbia, the U.S., and the UAE still want what's best for Britain, and they wish their homeland offered a better life and a brighter future.

"Don't get me wrong, I love the U.K.," says Griffiths. "This is my home country. This is my people….I think the British people are the best." But when he imagined building a life in Britain, the "cold hard reality" was "a lot of money," "a lot of uncertainty," "a lot of bureaucracy," and, at the end of it, the prospect of living "in a box in London."

Moving abroad has never been so easy, and air travel makes it even easier to return home to see family. So for ambitious young Brits, the decision to leave no longer means cutting themselves off from their roots. It means choosing a home that rewards their ambition and allows them to build the life they want.

This should worry British politicians. Young Britons are leaving because they do not believe they can achieve their economic goals at home. They are not unpatriotic. They are emblematic of core British virtues: hard-working, ambitious, entrepreneurial, and determined to punch above their weight. But in a changing Britain, many people who hold those virtues see other countries as more rewarding.

They have not left Britain. Britain has left them.

The post The Great British Exodus: Taxes, Housing Costs, and Terrible Healthcare Are Driving Young Brits Away appeared first on Reason Magazine.