What the Isle of Man earns from insurers and gambling firms

What the Manx national accounts actually measure

Statistics Isle of Man, a unit of the Cabinet Office, has estimated the island's national income every year since 1969/70. The estimates are built largely from income tax returns, and the office warns on its own publication page that each report typically describes a period at least twelve months old. The report for 2023/24 was published in December 2025 and revised in January 2026, so the newest complete account of the Manx economy available in 2026 covers 2023/24.

Three aggregates come out of it. Gross domestic product is the value of what is produced on the island in a year, and the report treats it as the personal and corporate income that production generates. Gross national product adds the interest, rents, profits and dividends that cross the island's boundary in either direction, which turns it into a measure of what Manx residents and Manx companies receive. Gross national income then adds taxes on production and removes subsidies.

GDP stood at £5.84 billion in 2023/24, against £5.80 billion in 2022/23. That is growth of 0.6% in cash and a fall of 2.5% once prices are adjusted by the Manx Consumer Price Index to March 2024. The World Bank, working in United States dollars and calendar years, put Manx output at about US$7.58 billion in 2023, or US$90,015 a head, with a real fall of 2%.

The accounts follow the European System of Accounts 2010. Under that framework the Manx figures include an estimate for illegal drugs and treat research and development as investment. Defined-benefit pensions are now valued at their actuarial cost. Two items that the United Kingdom adds were judged irrelevant to the island and left out: weapons, and decommissioning costs.

The report contains one inconsistency. Its Table 3 gives real GDP growth for 2022/23 as minus 5.0%, while the chart printed beside it plots 3.6% for the same year. The constant-price levels in Table 4, £6.31 billion for 2021/22 and £5.99 billion for 2022/23, agree with the table, and the table is what this article follows.

Which industries earn the Isle of Man's income

The report divides the economy into twenty-four activities, and their earnings, which it calls Manx-sourced income, came to £5.65 billion at current prices in 2023/24. Five of those activities accounted for 63.7% of the total that year: insurance at 16.9%, eGaming at 14.2%, professional services at 13.8%, other finance and business services at 10.2%, and banking at 8.6%.

Insurance earned £957 million in 2023/24, 1% more than a year earlier in cash and 2% less after inflation. eGaming, the report's name for online gambling, rose from £757 million to £801 million over the same year. The sharp movements were elsewhere. Information and communication technology fell from £389 million in 2022/23 to £247 million in 2023/24, a drop of 37% in a single year, Utilities more than doubled over the same year, from £31 million to £78 million.

Employment is spread differently. The 2016 census counted 41,636 people in work, and the sectors it names as the main employers are medical and health, financial and business services, construction, retail and public administration. Medical and health services earned £346 million in 2023/24, 6.1% of the total.

Why company income moves Manx output

Statistics Isle of Man also splits GDP by where the income goes. In 2023/24 company income made up 59.5% of it and personal income 32.8%, with the remainder in other categories. The company share was 63.4% a year earlier, and in the report's chart running from 2013/14 it has stayed between 58.5% and 63.5%.

The levels at constant prices show what that dependence does. Real GDP reached £6.63 billion in 2019/20 and had fallen to £5.84 billion by 2023/24, below the £5.92 billion recorded for 2014/15. Almost the whole of the fall is company income, which dropped from £4.21 billion in 2019/20 to £3.48 billion in 2023/24. Personal income over the same four years went from £1.91 billion to £1.92 billion. Residents' earnings held level while the output figure followed the companies down.

The long record has the same shape. Real GDP grew in every year from 1992/93 to 2014/15, by 13.5% in 1998/99 and 13.7% in 1999/00 at the top of the run. Since then it has shrunk in four years out of nine: by 0.9% in 2015/16, 8.0% in 2020/21, 5.0% in 2022/23 and 2.5% in 2023/24.

GDP and GNP can diverge sharply because interest, rents, profits and dividends cross the island's boundary in large amounts. In 2008/09 real GDP grew by 4.9% while real GNP fell by 5.9%. In 2022/23 Manx residents and companies paid £2.78 billion abroad in interest, profits and dividends and received £2.02 billion, a net outflow of £752 million. The next year the outflow narrowed to £226 million, with £2.54 billion leaving and £2.31 billion arriving. GNP therefore rose 11.3% in cash and 7.8% in real terms in 2023/24, to £5.85 billion, while GDP barely moved.

How the Isle of Man regulates online gambling

The Gambling Supervision Commission was established in 1962 as an independent statutory body. It regulates every form of gambling on the island, land-based and online: casinos, amusement and slot machines, betting offices, lotteries and online gambling. Its own site describes the Manx licence as "a mark of trust and credibility". Promotion sits in a separate body. Businesses thinking of applying are sent first to Digital Isle of Man's eGaming team, part of the Department for Enterprise, which advises on licensing and on setting up operations on the island.

Online gambling earned £801 million of Manx-sourced income in 2023/24, 14.2% of the total. Its weight in public finances is older than that figure: the Wikipedia account of the economy puts online gambling sites at about 10% of the Manx government's revenue in 2014.

Lotteries have a separate history on the island. The Isle of Man Government Lottery operated from 1986 to 1997. Since 2 December 1999 the island has taken part in the United Kingdom National Lottery, and since 2010 Manx projects have been able to receive its Good Causes funding, which the Manx Lottery Trust distributes. Tynwald receives the 12% lottery duty on tickets sold on the island.

What Manx tax law charges companies and residents

The standard rate of corporation tax on the Isle of Man is 0%, for resident and non-resident companies alike. Banking income is taxed at 10%, as are retail profits above £500,000, and income from land and buildings on the island at 20%. Individuals paid a top rate of income tax of 22% as of April 2024, and total tax on one person is capped at £200,000, or £400,000 for a couple assessed jointly. There is no capital gains tax, wealth tax, stamp duty or inheritance tax. Personal income is taxed on a worldwide basis, so residents are assessed on everything they earn anywhere.

Those rates are the island's own. Tynwald's education pages describe a jurisdiction that makes its own laws and raises its own revenue, and every February the Budget is presented in Tynwald Court as a motion to be debated and voted on. Finance passed to Manx control between 1958 and 1976. Over the twentieth century, according to the Wikipedia history, the government answered a declining tourist trade by promoting the island's low taxes and building an offshore financial centre. The International Stock Exchange opened an office on the island in 2017.

The regime has critics and a published defence. Wikipedia's economy section, drawing on the Paradise Papers, says low company tax and the absence of public registers of company ownership open routes to tax avoidance and evasion, and that hundreds of residents act as nominee directors and shareholders of shell companies. The island was left off a 2009 UK blacklist of tax havens. The government's constitution page says the island's economic and social achievements "would not have been possible without the stability which its constitution and institutions provide", and the government has set out what it calls a "whole-Island approach" to money laundering, financial crime and terrorist financing.

How the Common Purse ties Manx trade to Britain

The Isle of Man is in a customs union with the United Kingdom, and the customs revenue of the two is pooled and shared under the Common Purse Agreement. The arrangement has a cost the Channel Islands avoid: the island cannot set lower excise duties on alcohol and other goods of its own. Customs have been tied to Westminster since 1765, when the British government, in the words of the royal household's account, gave the island its own legislature "but required all customs and taxes to be paid into the British exchequer". The island's history follows how the smuggling trade provoked that settlement.

The island's tie to the European Union ran through trade in goods. The Isle of Man was never a member of the European Economic Community or the European Union, but Protocol 3 of the UK's Act of Accession placed it inside the EU customs area, so Manx goods crossed into the Union without tariffs. The island stayed outside the internal market. Since the United Kingdom left, the UK and EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement has applied to the island only for trade in goods and certain fisheries matters, and the government states that it can trade goods with the EU in the same way as the UK.

The currency is a Manx pound equal in value to sterling, and the Manx government issues its own notes and coins. The island also makes an annual payment to the United Kingdom for defence and the other common services provided on its behalf.

What visitors and the TT still spend

Tourist numbers on the Isle of Man peaked in the first half of the twentieth century, before English and Irish holidaymakers started flying to Spain for package holidays. In the national accounts for 2023/24 tourist accommodation earned £28 million, 0.5% of Manx-sourced income, and catering and entertainment £54 million, 1.0%.

Visitor counts are a separate series with its own break. Statistics Isle of Man ran the annual passenger survey until 2019, nothing was collected from 2020 to 2022, and Visit Isle of Man hired the consultancy Tourism South East to restart it in April 2023. For 2024 the survey counted 329,613 visitors, 307,934 of them business and leisure visitors and 21,679 from cruise ships, who spent an estimated £212.04 million over more than 1.6 million bed nights. In 2025, 645,265 passengers left the island, 50.5% of them visitors. Those visitors spent an estimated £262.9 million, or £807 each, and stayed 5.38 nights on average. The share travelling for a holiday was 40.3% in 2025, against 37.5% visiting friends or family and 22.2% on business.

The Tourist Trophy motorcycle races have been held since 1907, in late May and early June. The Manx government owns the rights to the TT and promotes it, and the Department for Enterprise reported 47,000 TT visitors in 2024. The Wikipedia account records almost 40,000 TT visitors in 2025, spending more than £50 million. Cancelling the races for the pandemic cost the government an estimated £4.8 million of projected revenue in 2020.

What else the Isle of Man produces

Agriculture, forestry and fishing earned £22.7 million in 2023/24, 0.4% of Manx-sourced income. The farms grow oats, wheat, barley, turnips and potatoes, and cattle and sheep graze the pastures of the central hills. The Loaghtan, the island's own sheep breed, gives a dark meat that has found favour with chefs. At sea, crab and lobster are fished commercially, and so are scallops, the queen scallop among them. The Peel smokeries still cure kippers, though mostly from North Sea herring now.

Brewing still answers to a Victorian statute. The Brewers' Act 1874 remains in force and allows brewers only water, malt, sugar and hops. Okells, founded in 1850, brews on a commercial scale, and several smaller breweries work beside it.

The accounts split manufacturing into engineering, which earned £27 million in 2023/24, food and drink at £36 million, and a general category at £60 million. The Wikipedia account describes manufacturing centred on aerospace and on food and drink, with firms making laser optics, industrial diamonds, electronics, plastics and precision aerospace parts.

Several newer lines were started by the government. Since 1995 more than 100 films have been made on the island with government financial support. In June 2021 the law banning commercial cannabis cultivation was repealed and the government offered licences for production and export, and in February 2022 the firm Peel NRE proposed spending US$136 million on growing houses and research facilities. Power comes partly from the island's own generators, hydroelectric among them, and partly over a 40 MW link to the grid of Great Britain. A 700 MW offshore wind farm has been planned.