You are probably here looking for a table: a list of countries against the withholding rate your fund suffers in each. We are not publishing one, because we could not verify one to a standard we would stand behind. Rates depend on the treaty between Ireland and each market, on whether the fund can actually claim the treaty rate, on how efficiently it reclaims, and on arrangements that differ between fund providers holding the same index. Published tables circulate; several disagree with each other, and none we found is authoritative for a specific fund.
What we can do — and what is more useful — is explain the mechanism precisely, and show you the one number that captures your real withholding cost without needing the table at all. It is published for every fund you own.
Our guide to fund domicile and US estate tax establishes a clean, verifiable fact: a US-domiciled ETF paying a non-treaty investor has 30% withheld from dividends, while an Ireland-domiciled UCITS fund generally suffers 15% at fund level on its US dividends under the US–Ireland treaty, and Ireland withholds nothing on distributions to non-residents. "Generally" is doing real work there: treaty access is not automatic, and depends on the fund being a treaty resident, satisfying the treaty's limitation-on-benefits article and certifying its status. For a mainstream Irish UCITS tracking a global index it is the normal position.
That figure is solid because it involves one treaty and one large, well-documented market. Readers then reasonably ask the next question — what about everywhere else — and that is where it stops being simple.
Where the tax is actually taken
Follow a dividend from a Japanese company held inside an Irish fund that you own from Dubai. Three points where tax could be applied:
At source. Japan withholds tax when the dividend leaves the company. The rate depends on the treaty between Japan and Ireland, because the shareholder of record is the Irish fund. Your own residence is irrelevant to this step, which is the part that surprises people.
At fund level. Ireland does not tax UCITS funds on their investment income, so nothing further is deducted here.
On distribution. Ireland applies no withholding on distributions to non-resident investors. And as a UAE resident you have no domestic tax on the income either.
So the whole of your withholding cost is incurred at the first step, invisibly, before the money ever reaches the fund's accounts. It never appears on any statement you see. That is precisely why it goes unnoticed and why people underestimate it.
Why the country table is harder than it looks
Four complications, each of which breaks a naive lookup.
A treaty rate is a maximum, not a guarantee. Claiming it requires documentation, and whether a fund gets the treaty rate at source, gets the statutory rate and reclaims later, or simply absorbs the statutory rate depends on the market and the custodian.
Reclaims take time and sometimes fail. Some markets refund excess withholding on application, over months or years, with a success rate that is not uniform.
Providers differ on the same index. Two funds tracking one index can experience different net withholding depending on custody arrangements and operational efficiency. So a table keyed to countries cannot tell you about your fund.
Securities lending muddies it further. Where a fund lends stock, the tax treatment of payments received in lieu of dividends is not identical to the dividend itself, and lending revenue partially offsets costs elsewhere.
The net of all that is a number. It is just not a number you can build from a country list.
The number that does capture it
Here is the useful part, and it is not widely known.
Index providers publish two versions of the same index. The gross version assumes dividends are reinvested with no tax deducted at all. The net version assumes tax is deducted — and MSCI's methodology applies, in its own words, "the maximum rate applicable to non-resident institutional investors who do not benefit from double taxation treaties". MSCI's text does not separately address reclaims; that no reclaim is assumed follows from the definition rather than being stated, so treat it as the sense of the rule rather than a quotation.
Read that carefully, because it is the key to the whole thing. The net index is a deliberately pessimistic case: a holder with no treaty access anywhere and no ability to reclaim. An Ireland-domiciled fund, which does have treaty access in many markets, should do better than that assumption.
Which gives you a practical measurement:
| Compare your fund against | What the result tells you |
|---|---|
| Its net index | The realistic benchmark. A fund tracking close to the net index, or ahead of it, is recovering withholding stronger than the worst-case assumption — that is treaty access and reclaim efficiency showing up in the return. |
| Its gross index | The theoretical ceiling nobody reaches. The gap between gross and net is roughly the size of the whole withholding question for that index. |
Fund factsheets and annual reports state which version they benchmark against, and it is usually the net index. Comparing the fund's return to that benchmark over five years gives you the combined effect of fees, tracking and withholding in one figure — which is the number that actually affects you, and which no country table can produce.
This is the same measurement we call tracking difference in our guide to what an ETF actually costs. Withholding is one of the things buried inside it.
The US comparison stands on its own, because it involves a single well-documented treaty. A US-domiciled fund withholding 30% against an Irish fund suffering 15% at fund level is a difference of half, on the largest component of any global index. At the index's current 1.5% yield that is 0.225 percentage points a year on the US sleeve — about AED 80,000 over twenty years on AED 500,000 growing at 7%, if the whole holding were US equities. On a global fund the arithmetic is smaller, because the 15-point difference applies only to the US portion: at 61.6% of the index the blended drag is around 0.14 points, and the same twenty-year comparison comes to roughly AED 50,000. Both numbers we have checked and would defend. What we will not do is extrapolate them into markets where we cannot.
How much of this should you care about
Proportionately. Two honest observations.
The US is the largest weight in any global index by a wide margin — 61.6% of the FTSE All-World as at 31 July 2026, on Vanguard’s own published country weights — so the one relationship we can verify happens to be the one that dominates. The remaining 40%, spread across dozens of markets at varying rates, matters less individually than the US does collectively.
And withholding applies only to the dividend component. On an index yielding around 1.5% — the published figure for both the FTSE All-World and MSCI ACWI at 31 July 2026 — even a meaningful difference in withholding rates is a fraction of a fraction. It is worth getting the domicile decision right — because that one is free and permanent — but it is not worth agonising over the second decimal place of a Swiss reclaim.
The larger determinants of your outcome remain the ones our other guides cover: whether you are invested at all, how much you contribute, what you pay in fees, and whether you stay invested through a bad year.
EW+ View
We could have published a plausible-looking country table. Several sites have. The problem is that we could not verify it to the standard this site holds itself to, and a table that looks authoritative and is wrong in places is worse than no table — because readers act on it.
The honest position is this. The US relationship is verifiable and it is the one that matters most, so get the domicile right and you have captured the large majority of the available benefit. Beyond that, the country-level detail is genuinely difficult to pin down for a specific fund, it varies between providers holding the same index, and the only reliable measurement is the fund's own performance against its net benchmark.
If someone shows you a precise country-by-country breakdown of your fund's withholding, the useful question is where they got it and whether it applies to your specific fund rather than to Irish funds in general.
Fund domicile drives US estate tax exposure and halves withholding on the largest part of a global index.
Common questions
On US dividends, 15% at fund level under the US–Ireland treaty. Beyond the US, the rate varies by market and by the fund's ability to claim treaty rates and reclaim excess deductions, and it differs between providers holding the same index. There is no single reliable figure we could publish for the rest.
Not at the point it is taken. Withholding at source depends on the treaty between the source country and the fund's domicile, because the fund is the shareholder of record. Your residence matters for what happens after distribution, and for a UAE resident that is nothing.
Compare the fund's return against its net index over five years. The net index assumes maximum withholding with no treaty relief and no reclaim, so a fund tracking close to it — or ahead — is recovering stronger than that worst case. That single comparison captures fees, tracking and withholding together.
Gross assumes dividends reinvested with no tax. Net assumes tax deducted at the maximum rate applicable to a non-resident institutional investor without treaty benefits. Check which one your fund actually reports against: MSCI's headline international index returns are net by default, whereas FTSE Russell publishes net-of-tax series as an optional additional variant — and in several forms, including a US regulated-investment-company version and a UK pension-fund version — so a FTSE index quoted without qualification is usually the gross figure.
The domicile decision is worth getting right, since it is free at the point of purchase and permanent. Chasing marginal differences between two Irish-domiciled funds tracking the same index is a much smaller effect, and the transaction cost of switching may exceed it.
Next steps
- Check the domicile of every fund you hold — the ISIN prefix is the fastest route, and IE means Ireland.
- Find which benchmark each fund reports against, and whether it is the net or gross version.
- Compare the fund's five-year return to that benchmark's five-year return. The gap is your real all-in drag.
- Treat that single number as the comparison between funds, rather than any country table.
- Do not extrapolate the US 15%-versus-30% figure to other markets — it is specific to that treaty.
Further reading on ExpatWealthPlus
- ETF investing guide for UAE expats
- S&P 500 from UAE: VOO vs CSPX vs VUSA vs VUAG
- Best ETF brokers for UAE expats
Official sources
Every figure in this article is checked against the primary source. These are the places to verify the current position for yourself, since rates, rules and product terms change.
- MSCI index methodology →The definition of net versus gross total return indices and the withholding assumption used
- iShares Core S&P 500 UCITS ETF (CSPX) →Issuer factsheet showing the benchmark used and tracking against it