Blog · 2026-07-08

Jersey and Guernsey trusts and foundations in 2026

How these structures actually work, what the registers show, and when you do not need one

Two small islands with a long trust history

Jersey and Guernsey are Crown Dependencies. They are not part of the United Kingdom and never joined the European Union: each has its own parliament, its own tax and trust legislation and its own financial regulator. English legal tradition combined with an independent legislature is what turned the Channel Islands into a place where wealthy families have kept long-term structures for four decades.

Let us clear away the illusion people arrive with most often. In 2026 neither a Jersey trust nor a Guernsey foundation hides money. Both islands maintain beneficial ownership registers, both take part in automatic exchange of tax information, both are regularly assessed against international anti-money-laundering standards. These structures answer questions of ownership, succession and asset protection. They do not answer the question of how to stay invisible to a tax authority.

What a Jersey trust actually is

A trust is not a company and not a legal person. It is a relationship: a settlor transfers assets to a trustee, who holds them not for himself but for beneficiaries or for a stated purpose. The trustee is the legal owner; the economic interest sits with the beneficiaries. The governing statute, the Trusts (Jersey) Law 1984, has been amended eight times, most recently with effect from 20 March 2026.

What Jersey law delivers in practice:

• Unlimited duration. Article 15 allows a trust to run for any period, and neither the rule against perpetuities nor the rule against excessive accumulations applies. A four-generation dynastic structure is legally sound here rather than a stretch.
• Reserved powers. A settlor may keep the power to revoke or vary the trust, to direct income and capital, to influence the appointment of directors of underlying companies. On its own that does not invalidate the trust under Jersey law.
• Firewall provisions. Questions of validity and of dealings with trust property are determined by Jersey law. A foreign judgment based on forced heirship or on a divorce division of assets is not automatically enforced.
• Non-charitable purpose trusts with no beneficiaries, policed by an enforcer. A neat way to hold shares in a private company.

The 2026 amendment tightened two points. Adult beneficiaries can no longer act together to collapse a trust against its terms where other potential beneficiaries exist or where purposes, charitable or otherwise, have been declared. For dynastic planning that is a straight gain: the settlor's intention is better protected. The second limb reorders the trustee's lien against third-party security interests, which makes lending against trust assets more predictable. Along the way the law confirms that a sole trustee cannot resign without appointing a successor.

Guernsey works on similar lines. The Trusts (Guernsey) Law 2007 abolished the old hundred-year cap, so a Guernsey trust can also run indefinitely, and section 14 carries its own set of firewall provisions against foreign judgments.

Choosing the trustee matters more than choosing the island

A professional trustee in Jersey must hold a trust company business licence issued by the JFSC under the Financial Services (Jersey) Law 1998. In Guernsey the equivalent role is licensed by the GFSC under the Regulation of Fiduciaries, Administration Businesses and Company Directors, etc. (Bailiwick of Guernsey) Law 2020, in force since 1 November 2021, which provides for full, primary, secondary and personal fiduciary licences. A family private trust company is not outside the perimeter either: Guernsey expects a full fiduciary licence or a limited permission, while Jersey offers a lighter regime where conditions are met.

The practical conclusion is blunt. Jersey and Guernsey law are about equally good. What will actually shape the next twenty years of your family's life is who sits on the other side of the table: how the trustee charges, how deep the team is, whether the firm survives a generational handover, how fast it answers correspondence and whether it has ever administered your kind of asset.

What a Guernsey foundation is, and a Jersey one

A foundation is a hybrid. Like a company it has separate legal personality: it owns assets in its own name, contracts in its own name, sues and is sued in its own name. Like a trust it has no members or shareholders. Instead there is a founder, a council, a guardian, and beneficiaries or purposes.

A Guernsey foundation is created under the Foundations (Guernsey) Law 2012, in force since 8 January 2013. The client cannot file the application himself: only a corporate service provider holding a full fiduciary licence from the GFSC may apply to the Registrar. Where no foundation official is a Guernsey licensed fiduciary, the foundation must appoint a resident agent.

Guernsey's distinctive feature, found nowhere else, is the split between enfranchised and disenfranchised beneficiaries. An enfranchised beneficiary is entitled to the constitution, the records and the accounts, and can go to court. A disenfranchised beneficiary is, by default, entitled to nothing. The constitution can provide for movement between the two classes, for example on reaching a given age. For a family that does not want a twenty-year-old to learn the size of the pot, this is a working mechanism rather than a statement of intent.

A Jersey foundation is governed by the Foundations (Jersey) Law 2009. Its council must always include a qualified member, a person regulated by the JFSC, and a guardian oversees the council. The charter is public; the regulations are not. Since the Financial Services (Disclosure and Provision of Information) (Jersey) Law 2020, a foundation also files abridged regulations that do go on the public record, but they are deliberately drafted so that no person can be identified from them. One more feature worth knowing: a beneficiary of a Jersey foundation has no interest in its assets and no right to demand information unless the charter or regulations say otherwise.

Trust or foundation: the real differences

A useful rule of thumb. Families raised in the common law world usually reach for a trust. Where the family's instincts are civil law or Middle Eastern, and the word trust makes relatives, local banks or local courts uneasy, a foundation explains itself far more easily: it is a legal entity with a charter and a board. We walk clients through both routes on our trusts and foundations page.

Confidentiality and beneficial ownership registers

Two separate questions get muddled here, so let us split them.

The trust itself is not registered. Neither island keeps a central register of trusts, the trust instrument is not filed with any authority, and no public record of your trust's existence comes into being. That is a genuine point of difference from the United Kingdom and its trust register.

Companies and foundations, by contrast, are registered, and beneficial ownership information is collected for them. If a trust owns a Jersey or Guernsey company, details of the controlling persons will reach the register.

How open are those registers as of September 2026:

• Neither island offers open public access.
• Jersey: since 2025 obliged entities, meaning regulated firms carrying out customer due diligence, can access register data. From January 2026 the regulator samples their search logs during inspections to check that searches served a legitimate purpose. A consultation on legitimate interest access for journalists and civil society closed on 30 January 2026.
• Guernsey: since August 2025 Bailiwick obliged entities can obtain the information for a lawful purpose. A public consultation on legitimate interest access closed on 10 April 2026 and the framework has not yet been enacted.

The direction of travel runs one way only, and it is worth accepting that. Build the structure on the assumption that the circle of people who can see the data will widen. If a plan falls apart the moment someone learns a beneficiary's name, it was never a plan.

Tax treatment of non-resident structures

Both islands follow the same logic. A trust is not itself a taxpayer; the liability sits with the trustee. Where neither the settlor nor the beneficiaries are resident on the island, tax arises only on locally sourced income. In Guernsey, for a trust with no resident beneficiaries, interest on a local bank deposit is not even treated as Guernsey source income.

The standard rate of corporate income tax on both islands is zero, with 10% and 20% reserved for specific activities such as banking, utilities and local property. Since 1 January 2025 both Jersey and Guernsey apply the OECD global minimum tax rules, giving a 15% effective rate for multinational groups with turnover above EUR 750 million. That is irrelevant to family structures, but worth remembering if a substantial operating group sits under the trust.

None of this is the main point. A zero rate on the island means nothing if you are tax resident somewhere with controlled foreign company rules, settlor attribution rules for trusts, or a distributions charge. Russia, most of the EU, the United Kingdom and the United States all look through the structure. The real question is not what Jersey will charge but what the countries of residence of the settlor and the beneficiaries will say. If you are also planning a change of residence or a second passport, our piece on succession and a second passport is worth reading: the order of the steps matters more than the steps.

CRS, CARF and information exchange

A professionally managed trust will almost always qualify as a reporting financial institution. Information about the settlor, the protector, other controlling persons and any beneficiary who received a distribution goes to the island's tax authority and from there to the countries where those people are resident.

Two changes are already live. From 1 January 2026 the updated version of the Common Reporting Standard applies, with definitions widened to bring crypto-assets, certain electronic money products and central bank digital currencies into scope. In parallel the Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework has started, and Jersey and Guernsey are both among roughly 48 jurisdictions due to begin exchanging under the new rules in 2027. The first reports covering 2026 data will land then.

The pragmatic takeaway: design the structure so that it looks correct to your own tax authority under full disclosure. Everything else has a shelf life.

What it costs

Most structures rest on a holding company owned by the trust or foundation. Our fees for incorporating that company:

Annual registry fees payable to the JFSC and the Guernsey Registry are a payment to the state. They sit outside our fee and change by decision of the island authorities. Jurisdiction detail lives on our Jersey company registration and Guernsey company registration pages.

Administration of the trust or foundation itself we quote individually, and that is not evasion. The price is driven by content rather than by island: how many underlying companies, whether there is an operating business, real estate, a managed portfolio, how many beneficiaries and across how many countries they live. As a Channel Islands market bearing, a straightforward family structure runs to a few thousand pounds to establish and from a few thousand pounds a year to administer. A structure with several companies, assets in different countries and active reporting costs a multiple of that, and some trustees charge on assets under management, which changes the arithmetic entirely on a large portfolio. We produce a firm quote once we have seen the asset mix and the family's residence map.

When it is justified and when it is overkill

Situations where a trust or foundation genuinely earns its keep:

• Succession outside forced heirship: assets held in trust fall outside the estate, and the distribution plan is set by the settlor rather than by the law of his nationality.
• Asset protection put in place early. It works only if the structure was created in calm weather. Transfers made once a claim is visible on the horizon get unwound as transactions against creditors.
• Family office and keeping a business in the family: shares in a private company held by a purpose trust or a foundation, with a family constitution setting the rules.
• Staged generational transfer: an heir receives a governed stream rather than a lump sum at twenty.
• Providing for a family member with special needs, and structured philanthropy.

Situations where it is overkill:

• A few million dollars of assets in a single country, an uncomplicated family, no conflict. A will, life insurance and an ordinary holding company do the same job for less.
• You are unwilling to give up control. A trust in which the settlor still decides everything will be unpicked as a sham by a court or a tax authority, and the protection fails precisely when you need it.
• You or key beneficiaries are US taxpayers. Foreign trust reporting will consume the benefit.
• The goal is to avoid tax. It will not work, and in 2026 that is no longer a debatable proposition.
• Your planning horizon is shorter than five to seven years. Set-up and running costs will simply not be recovered.

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