The unit of comparison
Each jurisdiction profile identifies a researched company form. The section is a comparison of those forms and their ordinary requirements; it is not an exhaustive catalogue of every legal vehicle or a claim that every company in a country receives the same treatment.
Public-record privacy: four equal checks
The rating covers directors, shareholders, beneficial owners and company accounts. Each dimension receives 0 points when ordinary public access exists, 1 when access requires restricted statutory eligibility, and 2 when it is not ordinarily public. The total ranges from 0 to 8; a higher number means less ordinary public access under these four checks.
- Public: ordinary access, including a reasonable registry fee, login, paid copy or routine inspection route.
- Restricted: a statutory interest, approved eligibility, court process or equivalent access gate must be established.
- Not ordinarily public: the public does not ordinarily obtain the record through the researched system. Authorities and regulated providers may still have access.
- Unknown: the current rule was not sufficiently verified. One unknown dimension leaves the total unscored; it does not earn privacy points.
The measure concerns ordinary records, not secrecy from authorities, address protection, cyber security or whether an owner can remain unidentified. It is Tax Heaven’s disclosed comparison method, not an official government or external secrecy index. Separate asset registers, including the UK Register of Overseas Entities for qualifying land holdings, can create additional public disclosure; see the privacy guide. Read the profile’s access route and limitations, especially where records are held outside the central registry or a future change is enacted.
Company rates and profit scenarios
The rate fields compare the researched ordinary company-layer treatment on gross pre-company-tax trading profits. Where a standard top marginal combined national and local rate is meaningful, lower bands, allowances and conditional reliefs are explained separately. A special refund, free-zone outcome or foreign-income exemption is not substituted automatically for the ordinary rate.
Retained and distributed profits can have different company-level treatment. Distribution-tax systems are expressed on a comparable gross-profit basis where verified; the statutory gross-up on a net distribution is explained in the profile. No owner’s personal income tax or outbound dividend withholding is included in the sorted rate. Those may create an additional layer.
Transparent vehicles, location-dependent combined taxes and unresolved treatments may have no comparable single rate. They are labelled rather than assigned zero. The table is not an effective-tax calculation for a particular profit amount, industry, group or owner.
How the two-factor sort works
Privacy-first sorts by the public-record rating from highest to lowest, then by the selected company-profit rate from lowest to highest. Rate-first reverses that priority. Unscored values follow verified values for the factor being compared. Remaining ties are alphabetical. The factors are never blended into an opaque weighted score.
Evidence and freshness
Profiles link to primary registries, tax authorities, enacted legislation and relevant public bodies. A source-check date records the research check, not the commencement of a rule. Current rules, enacted future changes and proposals should be distinguished. Official fees retain their currencies and qualification bands; absence of verification is not a free service.
Use the comparison as a research starting point
Before choosing a company, establish where it will actually be managed and trade, who will own and control it, where those people are resident, the source and character of its profits, reporting duties, banking eligibility, annual administration and the cost of distributing funds. A low local company rate does not determine the owner’s overall liability.