How Many Family Offices Are Actually in DIFC? The Honest Numbers

A Geneva client asked me in August for "the number". He had a board meeting, he wanted one line on a slide, and the line was going to say how many family offices are in DIFC. I told him I could give him three numbers and a footnote, or one number that would be wrong. He took the three numbers.

I still get asked this most weeks, and the reason nobody answers it cleanly is not secrecy. It is that the question assumes a category that the registers do not use.

The question has no single honest answer

Start with what "family office" can mean on a DIFC register. It can be a registered family office under the Family Arrangements Regulations 2023, which is a specific status with a specific application. It can be a single family office that is simply a private company owned by one family and holding its investments, needing no DFSA licence at all. It can be a DIFC Foundation that owns those companies. It can be an SPV holding one aircraft or one property. It can be a multi-family office, which is a regulated financial services firm and sits in a completely different column.

Now put ADGM next to it. ADGM's single family office is an ordinary ADGM company with no FSRA licence, so on ADGM's own statistics it is indistinguishable from a trading company or a holding vehicle. ADGM also reports "active licences", which include holding and investment structures counted on a basis that DIFC does not use. Two families with identical structures, one in each centre, would show up as different things in each centre's headline figure.

So when someone tells you DIFC has X family offices and ADGM has Y, ask them which register they pulled X from. Usually the answer is a press release.

The numbers anyway, with a column for what they count

These are the most recent official or officially sourced figures as at 13 September 2026. Read the middle column before the first one.

What is missing from the table is the row you came for. Neither centre publishes a count of single family offices as a category. DIFC's 1,250 is the nearest thing and it is deliberately broad. ADGM does not break its family structures out at all.

If you need one number for a slide, use DIFC's 1,250 family-related entities and put the definition in the footnote. Do not divide it by anything to guess at "real" family offices. We have tried, and every method produces a number we would not defend in a meeting.

What the growth actually reflects

The 30 per cent rise in DIFC registrations and the 34 per cent rise in ADGM operational entities are real, and the family segment is a meaningful part of both. But the composition matters more than the rate, and this is where our own files are more useful than the press releases.

The families arriving in 2025 and 2026 come from four places. UK families after the end of the non-dom regime, who tend to arrive with a London office already running and a family lawyer who has never filed anything in the Gulf. Indian promoter families, usually second generation, often with an operating business that is staying in India and a liquidity event that is not. Continental European families, Swiss and German and increasingly Italian, who already have a Liechtenstein or Luxembourg layer and want a second base for the next generation. And Gulf families who have run their affairs through personal names and trusted managers for thirty years and are now, sometimes under pressure from a bank, putting a structure around it.

The Henley Private Wealth Migration Report 2026, published 16 June 2026, gives the UAE a Wealth Mobility Competitiveness Score of 85.3 and calls it the leading millionaire destination of the past two years. That matches what we see. The same report recorded a 41 per cent rise in enquiries from UAE-based individuals between Q4 2025 and Q1 2026, and described it as contingency planning rather than an exodus. That also matches. We have not had a single family office client unwind a DIFC structure this year. We have had several add a second jurisdiction.

What they set up first is the part that distorts the count. Almost nobody arrives and registers a family office on day one. A UK family typically starts with a DIFC Foundation to hold the shares, then one or two holding companies underneath it, then, six to eighteen months later once they have hired someone locally, an entity that looks and functions like a family office. An Indian family often starts with a holding SPV for the liquidity event and a foundation follows. So the "family office" count lags the family count by a year or more, and the entity count runs ahead of both.

One passage from the onboarding side, because it explains why the lag exists. When we open the operating account for a newly formed family holding entity, the bank's questionnaire asks for the number of staff based in the centre. In our experience a zero in that box does not get you declined, but it does get you a second call, a request for the lease and a question about who actually makes the investment decisions and from where. Families learn quickly that the entity with no staff is a structure, not an office, and that the bank knows the difference. The registers do not.

What the numbers do not tell you

They do not tell you where the office is. A meaningful share of the family-related entities in both centres are run from London, Geneva, Mumbai or Singapore, with a DIFC or ADGM holding company, an outsourced director and a corporate secretary. That is a legitimate and often sensible structure. It is not a family office in the sense the client's board meant.

They do not tell you how many entities have anyone in them. An SPV that owns one property has no staff and never will. A foundation has a council and no employees. Both are counted.

They do not tell you how many families are behind the entities. One of our Zurich families has a foundation, three holding companies and a registered family office. That is five entries on the DIFC register and one family. Multiply that across the centre and the 1,250 could represent a few hundred families or rather more; we do not know and neither does anyone outside the Registrar.

They do not tell you where ADGM's single family offices are hiding. Because an ADGM SFO is an ordinary company, it sits inside the 13,974 licences with no marker. ADGM has positioned the SFO as the more accessible route for exactly that reason, and the price of accessibility is invisibility in the statistics. If you want the practical differences between the two regimes rather than the counts, the comparison is in our DIFC versus ADGM family office guide and I will not repeat it here.

And they do not tell you what the AUM growth means. ADGM's 54 per cent rise in assets under management is a growth rate on an undisclosed base using an undisclosed method. It may be entirely accurate. It is not a number you can put next to anything.

Reading a jurisdiction's numbers before you choose one

Four questions, in the order we ask them.

First, what is the unit. Company, licence, entity, firm and family-related entity are all different things, and a centre's headline number is whichever of those is largest. If the answer is "licence", ask whether holding structures are inside it.

Second, what changed rather than what the level is. A 30 per cent rise on a consistent definition tells you more than a total on an inconsistent one. Both centres are growing fast; the totals are what you cannot compare.

Third, what is excluded. In DIFC the single family office is outside the regulated firm count by design. In ADGM it is outside every published breakdown. If the thing you plan to set up is invisible in the statistics, the statistics cannot tell you how many peers you will have.

Fourth, which regime applies to you. DIFC's registered family office route under the Family Arrangements Regulations 2023 expects roughly USD 50 million in family net assets; a single family office serving one family needs no DFSA licence and can be structured below that level. ADGM's SFO needs no FSRA licence and sits in an ordinary company. The requirements on the DIFC side are set out in our note on DIFC family office rules and licensing, and the fuller walkthrough of the application is in the 2026 DIFC family office guide. Confirm thresholds against the current DIFC Registrar and ADGM Registration Authority guidance before you rely on either.

If the family is moving people as well as money, the sequencing of visas, leases and bank accounts matters more than which centre has the bigger number, and that is covered in relocating a family office to Dubai.

Where we come out

The Geneva client's slide ended up saying "DIFC: more than 1,250 family-related entities (DIFC, August 2026); ADGM does not publish a comparable figure". His board asked no follow-up questions, which is the best outcome a footnote can have.

The honest count of family offices in DIFC is that there is not one, and that the centre is growing at 30 per cent a year regardless. The honest count in ADGM is that the structure most families use there is not counted separately at all. Both facts are more useful than a number would be, because they tell you what the register measures and what it does not, which is what you actually need to know before you file.

We set up family office structures in both centres and are candid about which one fits a given family; you can read how we approach that on our family office setup page or the ADGM page. Atlas is part of the GTAG and Assetica group, and where a family's tax position needs advice, GTAG provides it separately. If you want the three numbers and the footnote for your own board, send us the question and we will give you the version we would put our name to.