Economists Gabriel Zucman and Ben Tippet have written a study proposing a 2% yearly tax on UK households holding more than £100 million in wealth. They estimate it would raise about £10 billion per year and affect fewer than 1,000 households. The Guardian, which reported on the study on July 21, 2026, describes Zucman as "the architect of the global wealth-tax movement." Zucman is a professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics and at the University of California, Berkeley. Tippet is a lecturer in economics and wealth inequality at King's College London.

A wealth tax is different from the taxes most people know about. Income tax takes a portion of what you earn each year. A wealth tax takes a small percentage of what you already own — your total assets, including property, savings, businesses, and other valuable things. Most countries do not have one, which is part of why this proposal is getting so much attention.

The idea has also caught the attention of politicians. Andy Burnham refused to rule out imposing a wealth tax, stating that people with assets over £10 million could be taxed to raise £10 billion a year. The Times and Sunday Times, via Facebook That revenue figure matches the one in the Zucman-Tippet study, but Burnham's threshold of £10 million is much lower than the study's £100 million. On July 20, 2026, it was reported that Burnham's chief political strategist had lobbied for a 2% annual wealth tax on assets over £10 million, which could raise an additional £10 billion. The Telegraph, via Facebook Neil Kinnock told Burnham to "Be audacious," as reported by Sky News. Sky News, via Facebook Unite, the UK trade union, has called for a 1% wealth tax on the super-rich, and Scottish Greens leadership contender Ross Greer has also called for a wealth tax on the super-rich.

The study from Zucman and Tippet says it would work in a specific way. HMRC — the UK's tax authority — would calculate the total wealth of the richest families, counting property, private businesses, pension wealth, art, land, and charitable assets under their control. The study includes a rule requiring rich families to keep paying the wealth tax for at least 10 years after leaving the UK, to stop people from simply moving abroad to avoid it. The study states its goal as "a focused tax on extreme wealth that can make billionaires pay the same tax rates as the rest, raise meaningful revenues and dampen runaway inequality." Zucman argues that given the small number of households affected, "the UK government could implement this quickly." Tippet contends that the usual criticisms of wealth taxes — they are too complicated to run, too hard to value assets, people may not have cash on hand to pay, and they hurt entrepreneurs — "do not hold" for this targeted proposal.

The broader context here involves Zucman's push for wealth taxes around the world. A Paris School of Economics publication on the Brazil G20 references Zucman's proposal for a 2% minimum tax on global billionaires' wealth, placing the UK study within a framework that has already reached G20 deliberations. The UK proposal narrows that global idea to households above £100 million, focusing on the very top of the UK wealth scale. Tippet's prior research at King's College London tracked every family on the Sunday Times Rich List from 1994 to 2025, and is described on his KCL profile as "the first dynamic analysis of a wealth tax on the UK wealth." King's College London That long-term work underpins the revenue modeling in the current study.

The convergence of the Zucman-Tippet study with Burnham's public positioning and his strategist's lobbying creates a new kind of alignment between academic research and a political figure who could plausibly seek national office. The £10 billion revenue figure appears across multiple strands — the study, Burnham's own statements, and his strategist's proposal — but the thresholds differ in an important way. The academic proposal sets the bar at £100 million; the political proposals use £10 million. That gap matters enormously in practice. A £10 million threshold would capture vastly more households than the fewer-than-1,000 the study envisions, with correspondingly greater administrative and political complexity. Tippet's argument that standard objections "do not hold" for a proposal targeting under 1,000 households would not necessarily transfer to a broader £10 million threshold, where valuation disputes, cash-flow problems, and changes in how people behave would all scale up.

The 10-year exit rule also raises questions. Exit taxes of this kind are rare in practice and can be hard to enforce, particularly for individuals whose wealth is spread across multiple countries. The study's proposal that HMRC itself calculate household wealth — rather than relying on self-assessment, where people report their own figures — is also a major change from how UK taxes normally work. It shifts the job of valuing assets onto the government, which may improve compliance but would require HMRC to build up significant new capacity for something it does not currently do at this scale.

The original publisher, journal, or institutional venue where the Zucman-Tippet study was first presented has not been identified in The Guardian's reporting. The Guardian Zucman's personal academic site hosts a PDF file dated March 26, 2026, from a publication first published in Great Britain in 2026 by a publisher whose name begins with "Basic," suggesting a forthcoming or recently released book-length treatment of these themes. His site also lists courses titled "Wealth, Tax, and Democracy" and "Public Economics" scheduled for Fall 2026 at ENS-PSL and PSE respectively.

What remains unresolved is whether the political momentum behind a UK wealth tax will settle on the narrow version from the study or expand to the broader threshold that Burnham and his strategist have floated. The difference between taxing 1,000 households and taxing everyone above £10 million is the difference between a surgical instrument and a structural fiscal change — and the arguments that work for one may not work for the other.