Introducing the Real Estate Secrecy Index

Since 2009, the Tax Justice Network has published the Financial Secrecy Index. This is a ranking of jurisdictions around the world, based on a thorough assessment of financial transparency and relevant areas of international cooperation. By combining the overall secrecy score with a global scale weight, the ranking reflects the share of global financial secrecy risk that each jurisdiction poses.

The Financial Secrecy Index is now widely used and trusted by organisations across the world, for research, policy analysis, criminal investigations and to carry out geographic risk assessment for anti-money laundering purposes. Those who use, cite and/or recommend the index include multiple UN bodies, the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, OECD, the European Commission, the FBI and the broader ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence alliance, along with a growing number of financial institutions.

A key insight of the Financial Secrecy Index is that the analysis is not binary. It is unhelpful to try to identify a set of jurisdictions that are bad (to be labelled ‘tax havens’, perhaps, or ‘non-cooperative jurisdictions’), while all others are by default deemed to be good. Instead, according to the Tax Justice Network, there is a spectrum of financial secrecy, by which all jurisdictions have a secrecy score substantially higher than zero (which would indicate perfect transparency and cooperation). All jurisdictions can make progress, and reduce the damage they cause worldwide. But some have greater responsibility than others.

The second insight is that the main global threats are not the small islands fringed with palm trees that remain a media trope for thinking about tax havens. When jurisdictions are assessed objectively on the basis of robust, verifiable criteria, it turns out that the greatest global risks by far are attributable to some of the major financial centres.

The United States has ranked first and worst since 2022. In the latest update to the Financial Secrecy Index, that position is only confirmed. With the Trump administration having pushed back against key areas of progress initiated under its predecessor, the US continues to pose the greatest threat to the rest of the world by facilitating crossborder tax abuse and the laundering of the proceeds of corruption and other crime.

Assessing real estate secrecy

Rather than update every component of the Financial Secrecy Index in a single revision every two years, we have recently adopted rolling updates. This allows us to keep the Index relatively fresh, while focusing each update on particular variables. The 2026 update addresses the indicators of so-called ‘golden visas’, by which jurisdictions sell citizenship and/or residency programs with no requirement for a minimum physical presence in the country and exacerbate risks of financial crime; and the transparency of real estate ownership.

The ease with which high-value property can be acquired and transferred makes real estate a prime asset for those seeking to park illicit gains. As such, effective transparency of the beneficial owners is a critical measure to protect the jurisdiction where the property is located, whose markets can become heavily distorted as they are also increasingly home to corrupt funds. This transparency is also important to protect those jurisdictions from which the dirty money funding the acquisition flows.

The real estate ownership transparency assessment in the Financial Secrecy Index is constructed to reflect the general availability of ownership data for immoveable property in each jurisdiction, as well as the ability of foreign companies and other legal vehicles such as trusts to hold local property while keeping the ultimate beneficial owners anonymous. The resulting score ranges from 0 to 100.

Jurisdictions scoring zero, for perfect transparency in this area include Denmark, Slovenia and Luxembourg. The latter might seem surprising, given Luxembourg’s longstanding role in financial secrecy provision more broadly. However, the jurisdiction has shown a greater willingness to address transparency concerns when they affect its own scant area than when they arise in its wider offshore financial sector, which continues to facilitate anonymous ownership of financial assets and income streams.

Most jurisdictions have intermediate scores – from Spain (25), China (40) and Norway (45) at the lower end, to Germany (55), Qatar (70) and the UK (both 80).

The perfect failure, a score of one hundred, is obtained by a small but significant group of countries – significant because they include some of the biggest real estate markets in the world like Canada, Australia, and Mexico.

The Real Estate Secrecy Index

Alongside the 2026 update of the Financial Secrecy Index, we have constructed a separate Real Estate Secrecy Index, which follows the methodology of the overall Financial Secrecy Index. This combines the secrecy score with a measure of global scale, in a cubic/cubed root formula to balance the components. Here we use the specific secrecy score of the real estate ownership indicator, and combine it with a measure of the market size for commercial real estate in each jurisdiction.

As the table of the top 15 jurisdictions shows, the worst actor in terms of the global risks posed through real estate secrecy is the same as for overall financial secrecy: the United States.

The other worst-ranked jurisdictions include some with large markets but somewhat better transparency (eg the UK and Italy), and a number with much smaller markets but perfect failure scores for secrecy, such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Not shown are the many jurisdictions with much larger markets than the UAE, but much stronger transparency that rank far down the index, including China, France, Germany, Japan and South Korea.

Policy opportunity

The UK has rescheduled its Illicit Financial Flows summit for December 2026. One component of the summit is intended to address the transparency of real estate ownership, and it is understood that discussions continue with invited jurisdictions. Meanwhile the UK government’s Anti-Corruption Champion (and long-time opponent of financial secrecy), Baroness Margaret Hodge, is working on a broad analysis of ownership transparency that is expected to make key recommendations in the coming months.

The opportunity is clear, to set a new standard and lead a global shift away from secrecy in some of the world’s largest real estate markets. With political commitment, the UK can advance into its summit with policies in place to reach the gold standard of transparency, and credibly encourage a range of participants to do likewise.

Many countries in the global South outperform major OECD countries. The OECD’s 2025 standard on exchange of immoveable property information will commence its first exchange in 2029 but so far has fewer than 30 members. With no loss of time, an obvious alternative would be to support a globally inclusive instrument to be developed as part of the ongoing negotiations on the UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation.