For most of the last century Milan was Italy’s office: the city you flew into for business and left for the weekend. That has changed. Over the past decade Milan has remade itself into the country’s capital of global wealth, the place internationally mobile families now choose to actually live. The shift has a name in the city’s salons: the svuota Londra effect. The end of Britain’s non-dom regime and a more turbulent world are sending capital in search of a stable, beautiful, well-connected home. In 2026, more and more of it lands in Milan.
The numbers behind the boom
The price data tells the story plainly. Prime residential values in Milan now average a little over 5,000 euros per square metre across the city, rising to between 8,000 and well above 20,000 in the central districts, and beyond 25,000 in the Quadrilatero della Moda and Brera, where a duplex changed hands for around 28 million dollars in 2025. Milan’s prime prices rose about 7% in a single year to mid-2025, the fastest of any major European city, and they are up roughly 38% over five years. Since the flat-tax regime arrived in 2017 the city’s values have climbed about 49%, against roughly 11% across Italy’s other large cities, and Milan has now overtaken Venice as the most expensive place to buy in the country.
Why the wealthy are choosing Milan
Milan offers a rare combination: a genuine financial centre, the global capital of fashion and design, and a compact, walkable European city with two international airports and the best private schools in the country. Onto that the tax regime has added a powerful pull. Italy’s flat tax for new residents, a fixed annual charge on worldwide income, has drawn an estimated 5,000 participants since 2017, with names from finance and industry among the recent arrivals, and Milan is where most of them want to be. We explain how that regime works in our guide to the flat tax for new residents, and we set the wider relocation race in context in our piece on Italy and the world’s millionaires.
The post-Olympic city
The timing is not an accident. Milan spent a decade rebuilding itself, from Expo 2015 to the skylines of Porta Nuova and CityLife, and the Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics in February 2026 added another chapter. The Games left behind regenerated districts rather than empty arenas: the Olympic Village at Porta Romana is converting to student housing, and the former rail yards at Scalo Farini and Porta Romana are becoming new neighbourhoods. For a buyer, that pipeline of design-led regeneration is part of what makes the city feel as though it is still being built upward and outward.
An honest word on supply
There is a real constraint to understand. A wide-ranging investigation into Milan’s planning approvals has, since 2025, frozen a number of construction projects across the city, with reports of around 1,600 apartments seized and thousands of buyers left waiting on stalled developments. A proposed law to unblock them passed the lower house in late 2024 but has since stalled in the Senate, where it has not become law and now risks lapsing, so the situation remains unsettled. For prime buyers this cuts two ways: scarcity supports values at the top of the market, but it makes the permit and title status of any new-build or off-plan purchase something to check carefully, with the right advisers, before committing.
Buying into Milan
We do not currently list Milan city apartments on our website, but we work the market directly and can find it for you, from a Brera or Quadrilatero apartment to a CityLife penthouse. Many of our clients also pair a Milan base with a retreat an hour away on the lakes, whether a modern villa on Lake Maggiore or a historic villa on the Como waterfront, the calm counterweight to the city’s energy. We cover that lake life in detail in our guide to living on the Lombardy lakes. For the national backdrop, see our analysis of Italy’s property market in H1 2026. When Milan is on your list, talk to us first.
Sources: Idealista and Knight Frank (Milan prime prices and growth), 2025/2026; Tecnocasa via CNBC (price growth since 2017); The Guardian and Corriere della Sera (relocation and flat-tax trend), 2026; reporting on the Milan planning investigation, 2025. Figures as of mid-2026.
