Should I buy a house in Monaco? An answer for international buyers
Publié par Paolo Petrini
Yes, if you buy the right apartment in the right building and hold it for five to ten years. No, if you are judging Monaco by rental yield: at 2 to 3 % gross, the yield is not where the return sits. Monaco is a capital market, not an income market, and the two are measured in completely different ways.
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Most buyers arrive with a model built for their own country. A Londoner prices in stamp duty and a survey. A Dutch buyer looks for a wealth tax line. An American asks about property taxes. A Swiss buyer wants to know what the annual holding cost is. None of those frameworks transfer cleanly to a market of 2.08 km² where the housing stock cannot be extended at the pace of global wealth. That constraint explains more about how value has behaved here since 2006 than any tax table does.
Key Takeaways: buying property in Monaco
The short version of what follows, for a buyer weighing whether to purchase property in Monaco rather than rent, or rather than buy somewhere else.
- YieldGross rental yields in Monaco sit around 2 to 3 % for most apartment types. That figure is correct, and it is not the reason people buy here.
- CapitalThe IMSEE resale price per square metre rose from 14 784 € in 2006 to 51 967 € in 2024, a multiple of 3.5 in eighteen years.
- HorizonThe market fell 13.4 % in 2009 before resuming. Monaco rewards a five to ten year horizon, not a two year one.
- Holding costMonaco levies no personal income tax, no wealth tax, no property tax and no residence tax. There is no annual charge based on owning a home.
- AcquisitionRegistration duty is 4.5 % for individuals and transparent structures, 7.5 % for opaque entities, which also pay 4.75 % on every change of beneficial owner.
- SuccessionInheritance between spouses and in the direct line is taxed at 0 % in Monaco. An unrelated beneficiary pays 16 %.
- SelectionPrice growth is not evenly distributed. The building, the floor, the view and the layout decide whether you hold the market or beat it.
Practical rule: if you are comparing Monaco to a bond or a rental portfolio at home, you are comparing the wrong things. Compare it to holding a scarce asset in a jurisdiction whose rules have not changed direction in decades.
The yield objection, and what it actually measures
Gross rental yields in Monaco range from roughly 2 % to 3 % for most apartment types, and anyone quoting that range is quoting it correctly. Global Property Guide, which tracks residential yields internationally, put the Monaco average at 3.26 % for the fourth quarter of 2025, with 2.21 % on studios, 2.23 % on one-bedroom units, 2.90 % on two-bedroom units and 2.88 % on three-bedroom units. Net returns, the same source notes, typically run 1.5 to 2 points below gross.
Read alone, that table leads to a predictable conclusion: the capital would work harder in equities, in credit or in a regional rental market. The conclusion is rational. The indicator was simply never designed to describe this market.
The published Monaco yields divide a median asking rent by a median listed price. Neither is a signed contract, and both come from advertised inventory, in a market where a significant share of transactions never reaches a public listing. The sample is partial by construction.
The internal inconsistency is visible in the same table. Four-bedroom units and above are reported at 6.10 %, roughly triple the studio figure. A single market does not produce a threefold spread across typologies unless the underlying medians are being drawn from stock that is not comparable. That is a signal about the method, not about the return on a Monaco apartment.
What our own transaction flow shows is simpler to state. Rental income in Monaco carries the asset. It does not explain why the asset is held.
None of this makes the yield irrelevant. It makes it secondary. The question that decides a Monaco purchase is what happened to the capital, and that has been measured officially for two decades.
What eighteen years of Monaco prices actually did
Between 2006 and 2024, the average resale price per square metre in Monaco rose from 14 784 € to 51 967 €. That is a multiple of 3.5, and it comes from IMSEE, the Principality's statistics institute, using the same measurement method throughout the period. It is not an estimate produced by a market participant.
Monaco resale price per square metre, selected years
Source: IMSEE, Observatoire de l'Immobilier, editions 2015 to 2025. Resale transactions with known floor area, historical method.
| Year | Price per m² | Year on year | What happened |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2006 | 14 784 € | reference | Start of the published series |
| 2008 | 28 342 € | +41.2 % | Pre-crisis peak, 1 075.7 M€ of resales |
| 2009 | 24 538 € | −13.4 % | The only significant fall in the series |
| 2014 | 37 242 € | +17.3 % | Recovery, 555 resales |
| 2018 | 48 583 € | +17.5 % | New-build programmes come to market |
| 2021 | 51 912 € | +9.0 % | Post-pandemic repricing |
| 2024 | 51 967 € | +1.1 % | Plateau in price, historical method |
| 2025 | 57 569 € | −1.4 % on a recalculated 2024 base | 429 resales, up 17.5 %, for 3.25 bn €, up 49.1 % |
Table by Petrini Exclusive Real Estate Monaco. IMSEE changed its calculation method for the 2025 edition: the 57 569 € figure covers a wider transaction base than the years above it, and the −1.4 % variation is the one IMSEE publishes against a 2024 recalculated on the same new basis. The 2025 level should therefore be read as a new starting point rather than as a jump from 51 967 €. What did move in 2025 is volume and value, not the price per square metre.
Three things in that table matter more than the headline multiple. The first is 2009: prices fell 13.4 % in a single year. Monaco is scarce, not immune. The second is that the steepest years cluster around periods when new or renovated stock reached the market, which is a supply story rather than a sentiment story. The third is the shape of 2025. The average price per square metre did not surge, and on IMSEE's own recalculated basis it edged down 1.4 %. What surged was activity: 429 resales, up 17.5 % on 2024, for 3.25 billion euros, up 49.1 %, with an average resale ticket of 7.6 million euros, up 26.8 %.
A market where the number of transactions and the average ticket rise while the price per square metre holds is a market where buyers are moving up in quality rather than paying more for the same thing. It is also, for anyone who will one day need to sell, a measure of depth: 429 completed resales in a year, at an average of 7.6 million euros, is a market that absorbs a property of that size without the price having to be discounted to find a buyer. That distinction is worth understanding before choosing what to buy, and it is why the price per square metre by district and property type tells you more than the national average ever will.
The tax question comes before the property question
For most international buyers, the property decision follows a tax and residence decision that should be settled first, with advice in both jurisdictions. What Monaco offers on that front is unusually simple to describe, and the simplicity is the point.
Monaco levies no personal income tax on resident individuals, a principle in place since an 1869 sovereign ordinance, and no wealth tax, no property tax and no residence tax. There is no annual levy attached to owning a home in the Principality. The only recurring costs an owner actually faces are private ones: service charges and insurance. One exception exists and it is national, not general: under the Franco-Monegasque convention of 18 May 1963, French nationals who moved their residence to Monaco after 13 October 1957 remain liable to French income tax. It applies to French citizens, and to no one else.
Inheritance is territorial: Monaco taxes assets situated in the Principality, whatever the domicile or nationality of the deceased. The rate depends only on the family relationship. Between spouses and in the direct line, it is 0 %. Between siblings it is 8 %, between uncles or aunts and nephews or nieces 10 %, between other relatives 13 %, and between unrelated persons 16 %. For a buyer coming from a jurisdiction that taxes worldwide estates at 40 %, that single line often reframes the whole exercise, which is why buyers arriving from Britain tend to work through the tax position of former UK non-doms in Monaco before they look at a single floor plan.
On acquisition, registration duty is 4.5 % for individuals and for structures meeting the transparency criteria of Law 1.381 of 29 June 2011, and 7.5 % otherwise. Opaque entities are also taxed at 4.75 % of the property's market value on each change of beneficial owner, which deliberately removes the classic advantage of transferring shares instead of transferring the property. Notary fees follow a regressive scale set by sovereign ordinance, with a top band of 1.50 %. Buying in your own name is simpler and cheaper, and the law is designed that way.
Residence is a separate matter and one where our role stops at advice. For a non-EEA national, a type D establishment visa must be obtained from the French consular authorities before Monaco examines the file at all, and the residence card itself is issued by the Section des Résidents of the Direction de la Sûreté Publique. Each application is assessed on its own merits by the administration, never by an agency. One point is often misstated: the Tribunal Suprême held on 12 July 2022 that a minimum of three months' presence in the Principality is not a legal condition for renewal, although the administration retains discretion over files where effective residence appears absent. You can own in Monaco without being a resident. The two decisions are independent, and they are usually taken in that order.
Monaco next to the places you are also looking at
Nobody shortlists Monaco alone. The same buyer is usually running the numbers on Dubai, Switzerland, Italy and Portugal in parallel, and the honest comparison is not that Monaco wins on every line. It is that Monaco wins on the lines that survive a decade.
What the shortlist actually looks like in 2026
Sources: Monegasque Government portals, UAE Government portal and Executive Council Resolution 30 of 2013, Swiss Federal Tax Administration and Geneva cantonal thresholds, Agenzia delle Entrate art. 24-bis TUIR, Portuguese CIMT as amended by Lei 73-A/2025. Position at September 2026.
| Jurisdiction | Personal tax on residents | Cost to acquire | Point to check |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monaco | No income, wealth, property or residence tax | 4.5 % registration in own name | Residence granted case by case by the administration |
| Dubai | No personal income tax, no inheritance tax | 4 % Dubai Land Department fee | Freehold only in designated zones; 5 % municipality fee on annual rental value |
| Switzerland | Lump-sum taxation on expenditure, from CHF 435 000 federal minimum in 2026 | Cantonal transfer duties, variable | No gainful activity permitted in Switzerland |
| Italy | Flat substitute tax of 300 000 € per year for residence transfers from 1 January 2026 | Registration duties, variable by status | Entry ticket tripled in two years, from 100 000 € |
| Portugal | NHR closed; successor regime at 20 % for qualifying activities, 10 years | IMT up to 7.5 %, and 10 % for buyers domiciled in a listed jurisdiction | Former NHR beneficiaries are excluded from the new regime |
Table by Petrini Exclusive Real Estate Monaco. Rates are stated as published by the competent authorities at the date shown and are not tax advice; every situation requires an opinion from a qualified adviser in both jurisdictions.
The Italian line is the one that repays a second look. The flat regime for new residents cost 100 000 € a year until 2024, 200 000 € from 2025 and 300 000 € from 1 January 2026, and each increase applies to those transferring their residence from its effective date, so anyone who exercised the option earlier keeps, as a rule, the amount they signed up to. A ticket that triples in two years is still a policy decision, and policy decisions get revised. Monaco's absence of income tax rests on a principle established in 1869 and has survived every European fiscal cycle since.
Dubai deserves the same directness. Its fiscal case is real, its acquisition cost is lower, and for a buyer whose life is organised around Asia and the Gulf it can be the right answer. Two facts belong in the comparison. Freehold ownership is confined to designated zones, and the golden visa obtained through property investment runs for five years, not the ten frequently quoted. And the UAE National Center of Meteorology reports average daily maxima of 39.7 to 43.8 °C in July, which for a family deciding where to live for the next thirty years is not a footnote. Both points are examined in our comparison of Dubai and Monaco as a life choice covers in detail.
Monaco's own answer to that comparison is geographic before it is fiscal. The Principality sits inside Europe without being in the European Union, thirty minutes from Nice airport, in the same time zone and the same cultural space as the businesses and families most European buyers are leaving behind. The tax position is gained without a change of continent, and for many families that is the decisive line.
Stability is the asset
The reason property in Monaco behaves differently from property in London, Lisbon or Dubai is not scarcity alone. It is that the rules governing it have not changed direction in living memory.
Monaco has been governed by the Grimaldi family since 1297. The absence of personal income tax dates from 1869. The land itself has been extended deliberately and rarely, by Fontvieille in the 1970s and by Mareterra in 2024, bringing the country to 2.08 km². A buyer in Monaco is not underwriting a tax regime that a new parliamentary majority may withdraw at the next budget. That is a different category of risk from the one attaching to any of the alternatives above, and it is a large part of what an owner is paying for at these price levels.
The population data shows how that has been received. IMSEE counted 38 857 residents at the end of 2025, holding 144 nationalities, with British nationals fourth at 3 081 residents. No single community dominates, which is itself unusual and part of why a family that moves here rarely feels foreign. Add to that a market in which IMSEE publishes aggregates rather than individual sales, so that what a family paid for its home is not a matter of public record, and the picture is close to the one that explains why ultra high net worth individuals choose Monaco over larger capitals.
Stability and discretion decide where the capital goes. The building decides what it does once it is there.
Buying to let in Monaco, and how it actually works
Buying and letting are not alternatives in Monaco. Many owners do both, and the letting side exists to carry the asset rather than to generate the return.
In practice this means an apartment bought for the medium term, let on a managed basis, with the tenant search, the lease, the inventory, the works and the relationship with the co-ownership handled by the agency. The rent covers the running of the property and produces the 2 to 3 % that the yield tables describe. The capital does the rest, and the two combine into a position that is neither a rental investment in the usual sense nor an unused second home.
What decides the outcome is not the rent achieved in year one. It is the building, and then the details of the building, and three of them are underestimated at purchase with striking consistency.
Parking. Not whether a space exists, but how many, how large they genuinely are, and where they sit in the building. In a country of 2.08 km² this is a structural scarcity. A buyer who waives it at acquisition discovers its price on the way out.
The condition of the co-ownership. The concierge service, the state of the common areas, the works already voted and the works still to come. A buyer studies the apartment. A seller discovers the building.
The building itself. Standing among the people who actually transact here moves slowly and appears in no public statistic. It is what separates two apparently identical apartments at resale, and it is the single thing an outside buyer cannot assess alone.
Those judgements come from having seen the same buildings transact repeatedly over decades, which is what our own records and Eugenia Petrini's forty years of archives are for. It is why we can tell an owner not only what a four-room apartment in Monaco is worth today, but which of two apparently similar ones will resell better in seven years.
The renovation play is over
One strategy that used to work in Monaco no longer does, and it is worth saying plainly because it is still recommended to buyers who arrive from abroad.
Buying a tired apartment cheaply, renovating it and reselling at a premium was a reliable trade for years. It has largely closed. Genuinely underpriced stock in need of works has become scarce, and the professional dealers who compete for it are experienced, fast and well capitalised. An international buyer arriving with that plan is competing against people who do this every week, on their ground.
What has replaced it is a slower and less glamorous discipline: buying quality that is correctly priced, holding it, and knowing when to sell. That requires a view on which buildings are gaining ground and which are quietly losing it, and the reasons the buying cycle has started in Monaco set out that analysis in full. The advantage has moved from the renovation budget to the selection.
So, should you buy in Monaco?
Yes, under conditions that can be checked one by one.
Buy if your horizon is at least five to ten years, because the series above contains a 13.4 % fall and a plateau, and both were absorbed by time. Buy if the tax and residence position has been settled first with advisers in both countries, because the property decision is downstream of it. Buy if you are acquiring in your own name or through a transparent structure, since the alternative costs three points more at entry and is taxed again at every change of beneficial owner. Buy if you have taken a view on the specific building rather than on Monaco in general, because the average price per square metre is an average of very different outcomes.
Do not buy if you need the asset to produce income, if you may need to exit within two or three years, or if the purchase only works on a spreadsheet built for the market you are leaving.
That is the whole answer, and it is the one we give in person. The market rewards patience, selection and a clear view of what is actually being bought: not a yield, but a scarce asset in a jurisdiction that has kept its word for a very long time.
Frequently asked questions about buying property in Monaco
- Is buying property in Monaco a good investment?
It has been a strong long-term one. The average resale price per square metre rose from 14 784 € in 2006 to 51 967 € in 2024 according to IMSEE, a multiple of 3.5 in eighteen years, with one significant fall of 13.4 % in 2009. Monaco rewards a five to ten year horizon and careful selection of the building, not short-term trading. - What return can you expect from a Monaco apartment?
Gross rental yields sit around 2 to 3 % for most apartment types, and net returns run roughly 1.5 to 2 points lower. That income covers the holding of the asset. The return in Monaco has historically come from capital appreciation and from the scarcity of a housing stock confined to 2.08 km². - Do you pay tax on property in Monaco?
There is no property tax, no residence tax and no wealth tax in Monaco, and no personal income tax for resident individuals, a principle in place since 1869. Registration duty on acquisition is 4.5 % for individuals and transparent structures, and 7.5 % for opaque entities. Recurring costs are private: service charges and insurance. - Can a foreigner buy property in Monaco?
Yes. There is no nationality restriction on buying residential property in Monaco and no requirement to be a resident. Ownership and residence are two separate procedures: the purchase is completed before a Monegasque notary, while a residence card is granted case by case by the Section des Résidents of the Direction de la Sûreté Publique. - Is it better to buy in Monaco or in Dubai?
Dubai has a lower acquisition cost at 4 % and no personal income tax, but freehold ownership is limited to designated zones and the golden visa obtained through property runs for five years. Monaco offers a European location, no annual holding tax and a legal framework unchanged for generations. The choice usually turns on where the family actually intends to live. - How long should you hold a property in Monaco?
Five to ten years is the horizon that matches how this market has behaved. The published price series includes a 13.4 % fall in 2009 and a plateau in 2024, both absorbed over time. Shorter horizons expose a buyer to acquisition costs and to timing, without the compounding that has driven Monegasque values since 2006. - Do you need to be a resident to buy in Monaco?
No. Non-residents can buy and own property in Monaco on the same terms as residents, and many owners let their apartment through an agency rather than occupy it. Petrini Exclusive Real Estate Monaco handles both the acquisition and the subsequent letting and management for owners who live elsewhere.
Related Guides
Buying guideBuying a property in MonacoNotaries, acquisition costs, the purchase process and the documents required.Moving hereSettling in MonacoResidence, schools, banking and the practical steps of a move to the Principality.RequirementsConditions for living in MonacoWhat the administration actually asks of a new resident, and who decides.MarketMonaco property market analysisOur recurring analyses of transactions, prices and rents in the Principality.
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