Tax havens, named: which countries do the work, and what each one is for

The short version: "tax haven" is a single phrase for two different jobs. Some places are where money stops and is taxed at nothing. Others are respectable economies that money passes through on its way, picking up a treaty benefit in transit. This cluster names the jurisdictions and sets out what each one is actually for. It is the who. The how, the mechanics of conduits and treaty shopping, lives on its own page, and we link there rather than repeat it.

There is a habit of talking about tax havens as if they were all the same: a palm tree, a brass plate, a numbered account. They are not the same. They divide into two roles, and the division is the whole map.

A sink is where money comes to rest. Income arrives, is taxed at little or nothing, and stops. The British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands and Bermuda are sinks. They have, in most cases, no corporate income tax at all, so there is nothing for the money to lose by staying.

A conduit is a stop on the way. Money flows in from a high-tax country and flows out again to a sink, and the conduit's job is to make sure the journey is cheap, chiefly by avoiding the withholding tax a country charges when income leaves it. A conduit is usually a developed economy with a dense web of tax treaties: the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Singapore, Ireland. The mechanism by which a conduit earns its keep is set out in full on the conduit jurisdictions page; we do not repeat it here.

The worst offenders, ranked

The Tax Justice Network's Corporate Tax Haven Index measures how much room each jurisdiction gives multinationals to undertax their profits. In its current edition, the version 3.0 update of October 2024, the top five by that measure are:

1. British Virgin Islands
2. Cayman Islands
3. Bermuda and Switzerland (the index scores them level at the top)
4. Singapore

The top ten jurisdictions between them account for roughly half of the world's corporate-tax-abuse risk. The British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands and Bermuda each score a perfect 100 out of 100 on the index's haven measure, meaning the maximum legal room for corporate tax avoidance. Three of the top four on that list are British Overseas Territories.

That last fact is not a coincidence, and it is the reason the first page below exists.

The pages in this cluster

• The UK spider's web. The signature. Three of the world's top four corporate tax havens are British territories, and the City of London sits at the centre of a network that radiates out through the Crown Dependencies and the Overseas Territories. Taken as one entity, the UK and its satellites account for about a third of global corporate-tax-abuse risk. Who controls them, and who answers for them.
• The European conduits. Ireland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Switzerland: what each one offers a multinational, and what the European Union has done about it. These are the respectable addresses, not the palm trees.
• Delaware, Singapore and the Mauritius route. America's own onshore haven inside its own borders; Asia's pre-eminent holding hub; and the conduit that for thirty years let investors avoid Indian tax entirely, until a 2016 treaty change.

A note on what these pages are not

These pages describe roles, using public data, chiefly the Tax Justice Network's two indices. They name a company only where it is a matter of documented public record, and they describe what a jurisdiction does rather than accuse it of a crime, because in almost every case no crime is alleged. The structures these havens host, the Double Irish and its relatives, are explained step by step in the structures encyclopedia. The mechanisms, transfer pricing, royalties, conduits, are explained in how they do it. This cluster is the geography.