What it actually takes to move a business here, and when it's a terrible idea.
Half the people who read this will work out it doesn't apply to them. The other half will find out what it actually costs to do it properly.
Two minutes to find out whether this is even for you. No email, no signup.
Plenty of people write this off as a scam because of how it gets marketed. It isn't. The numbers are real and they're large. Here's $500,000 of business profit, run both ways.
Illustrative, FY2026-27 rates, assumes you take all the profit out. The guidebook has a calculator that runs your own numbers.
When you stop being an Australian tax resident, section 104-160 deems you to have sold every CGT asset you own at market value, with Australian real property the main exception. No sale. No cash. Still a taxable gain.
Shares in your own private company are not exempt. So if the business is worth $3m and cost you a hundred dollars, boarding the plane is a $3m capital gain.
On those numbers you'd save $169,000 a year before running costs and owe roughly $700,000 on the way out. That's the better part of five years before you're square, and only if you stay gone. From 1 July 2027 it gets worse: the 50% CGT discount is replaced by cost base indexation plus a 30% minimum rate, and on the Budget commentary a departing resident doesn't get the indexation.
That's not an argument against doing it. It's an argument against doing it casually.
The structure doing the rounds puts an Australian holding company over a Dubai one, adds a foundation and some SPVs, and promises close to zero tax.
It sells the outcome of leaving Australia to people who have no intention of leaving. If you stay, the controlled foreign company rules attribute the Dubai profit back to you whether it's paid out or not, and the Dubai company is probably an Australian tax resident anyway because you're the one making the decisions.
Same boxes. Same arrows. Opposite answer.
There's a checker in Chapter 1 that asks six questions and tells you which list you're on. It also flags the trap most people miss, which Chapter 5 covers properly: a free zone licence is not automatically 0%, and consultancy isn't on the qualifying list.
One thing: deciding whether to do this at all, when you own the business.
Not deciding whether to move to Dubai. Not doing your expat tax return. Not the incorporation itself. Deciding.
You need both halves at once, and I couldn't find them in one place. The Australian firms write about leaving Australia and do it well. The UAE firms write about free zones and corporate tax and do that well too. Neither seems to have read the other. I ended up reading both and stapling them together, which is how this exists.
It also isn't selling you anything. I don't do company formations, so I've got no reason to want your answer to be yes.
Schools, rent, healthcare, which neighbourhood. Atlas Wealth's relocation guide is 65 pages on exactly that and it's good. Go and read it.
If you're a salaried expat with a share portfolio and a property back home, Odin Tax and bdh have that covered properly. This is written for people who own the company.
The formation agents do incorporation well and cheaply. Use one. This is the thing you read first, so that everything you pay for afterwards is the right thing.
It also isn't advice, and it never pretends to be. I'm not a registered tax agent and I'm not a lawyer, in either country. I won't tell you what your tax position is. What I can do is describe the terrain, tell you where I fell in, and point you at people who are registered to take a position. There's a section at the back listing the fifteen things I could not get a straight answer on, including the fact that the ATO has published nothing at all on how a UAE foundation is treated.
What you do, where your customers are, where the work happens, whether you can actually move, your profit, and what the business is worth. It tells you whether it travels, whether it works but only at 9%, or whether you should stop reading.
Your Australian tax now, your UAE tax instead, what you actually keep once the running cost comes off, and the exit tax both before and after the 2027 rules change. Then how many years until you're ahead. For a lot of people that number is the whole answer.
I moved to Dubai in 2009 and started Specialty Batch Coffee here in 2011. Since then I've built a roastery, a café, a pub and a technical service division looking after equipment in a few hundred venues across the UAE. I've incorporated companies, renewed licences, argued with banks, missed deadlines I didn't know existed and paid for advice that turned out to be wrong.
The other half of it is Australian. Alongside the UAE businesses I've been an investor and shareholder in a handful of Australian ventures across independent media and publishing, a consultancy, and a couple of digital products. Every one of those has had a founder ask me at some point whether they should move offshore, and every one of them got a different answer.
So I've sat on both sides of this. None of it makes me a tax adviser. It does mean I've made most of the mistakes in the guidebook personally, and watched other people make the rest.
Six questions and you'll know whether your business can make the trip at all. If it can't, you'll have found out before reading a single chapter, and that's worth knowing.
Spotted an error, or know the answer to something on my "what I don't know" list? gday@ryangodinho.com. I'd genuinely like to hear it.