Fund domicile statistics — where the world's funds are actually domiciled, in numbers

On the most comparable single lens that exists — SEC Form ADV private-fund filings, one form for every domicile — 104,073 private funds are live worldwide (of 165,474 that have filed since 2011), and the ranking is stark: the United States holds 74.9% of them, the Cayman Islands 14.7%, and every other domicile — Luxembourg, the UK, Ireland, the Channel Islands, BVI, Bermuda — fights over the remaining tenth. Our own register captures hold 254,540 searchable fund names across eight regulator sources and 233,438 named funds on disk across nine. This page puts the counts side by side — and states, per register, exactly what each number can and cannot claim, because the registers' vintages and access rules differ enough that a single "funds per domicile" table without caveats would be fiction.

Three different questions hide inside "how many funds does domicile X have": how many are live now, how many ever existed, and how many you can actually look up by name. The gap between those three numbers is itself the most useful statistic here — Cayman is the world's second-largest private-fund domicile on the US disclosure lens, yet publishes no accessible per-fund name list at all. Use this page with the domicile comparison (which regime to pick) and the Fund Data hub (search the funds themselves).

Live vs cumulative funds by domicile — the Form ADV lens

SEC Form ADV Schedule D 7.B.1 is the only dataset where one filing standard covers funds in every domicile: every private fund run by an SEC-registered adviser reports its domicile the same way. The bias is equally clear — it sees only funds with a US-registered adviser, so US-facing domiciles (Cayman, BVI, Bermuda) are well captured and purely EU-distributed funds are under-counted. "Live" is derived, not a regulator status: a fund counts as live when its latest filing falls in the final bulk year (2024) and its controlling adviser was still SEC-registered on the IAPD roster of 2026-07-06. An adviser must refile annually, so an older last filing — or a deregistered adviser — means the fund has almost certainly wound down.

Two derived ratios in that table are worth more than the raw counts. The still-live ratio (live ÷ cumulative) is a rough survival rate on this lens: Luxembourg's 70.2% and the US's 66.4% sit well above Cayman's 52.4%, Guernsey's 53.5% and BVI's 48.7% — and Bermuda's 36.7% is the lowest of the major offshore centres, meaning roughly two of every three Bermuda funds that ever filed have stopped filing. Read it as turnover, not quality: short-lived SPV-style vehicles depress the ratio by design.

What each domicile's own register shows — counts and vintages

The regulators' own registers answer a different question — what is on their books, regardless of any US adviser link. They disagree wildly on accessibility: four publish machine-readable per-fund names, one sits behind a bot-wall, and three publish only aggregate statistics or partial lists. These are the register captures we hold, each with its own as-of date — the vintages differ, so do not read this column as one synchronised snapshot.

Across the name-bearing registers this comes to 233,438 named funds on disk (reconciled 2026-07-22; the JFSC/CIMA/GFSC aggregate rows carry no names) — explicitly not deduplicated across sources: the same Irish QIAIF sits in the CBI register and in ESMA's, and an offshore fund can sit in its home register and in SEC data.

The searchable universe — 254,540 names, and who supplies them

The fund search is built one-source-per-name, so its composition is an honest, non-overlapping split of where usable fund names actually come from. The answer is lopsided: US disclosure supplies three-quarters of every fund name you can search — not because the US has three-quarters of the world's funds, but because it is the only jurisdiction publishing deep, bulk, free fund-level data.

The flow — where newly filed funds are being formed (2026 Q2)

Stock tells you history; flow tells you where formation is happening now. The best free flow signal is the SEC Form D quarterly dataset — in 2026 Q2, 10,912 Form D filings declared a pooled investment fund, of which 6,007 were new notices (first filings, not amendments), reporting $125.1bn already sold at filing from 127,361 investors. Counting the offshore and European places of formation that appear inside that one US quarter:

Alongside the private flow, the registered US universe (the SEC's investment-company series/class file, updated 2026-07-21) counts 2,047 registrants, 19,340 fund series — a "series" is what an investor would call a fund — and 43,123 share-class rows. And in the most recent 14-day live EDGAR window (as at 2026-07-21), 1,762 pooled-fund Form D filings landed — the running pulse the fund registrations page tracks weekly.

Method and coverage gaps

• Register vintages differ — every table states its own as-of. The ADV domicile lens is capped at 2024-12-31 (the SEC ended fund-level bulk there); register-name snapshots date to 2026-07-05 with weekly refreshes (last 2026-07-19); the BVI capture is 2026-07-19; the Form D quarter is 2026 Q2. No cross-table arithmetic survives those mismatches — resist the urge to add columns across tables.
• Three totals, three different questions. 104,073 = live private funds on the ADV lens; 233,438 = named funds held across nine registers (overlapping, undeduplicated); 254,540 = names in the search index (non-overlapping by construction, one source per name). None of them is "the number of funds in the world" — no such number is publishable from public sources.
• "Live" is derived. Filing recency + adviser registration, applied identically to every domicile — an approximation of each register's own status field, which only the register itself can confirm.
• Counting units differ. Ireland's register counts sub-funds of umbrellas; ESMA counts AIFs; CSSF list counts entities; Form D counts filings. A Luxembourg SICAV with twelve compartments can legitimately be 1, 12, or 13 records depending on the register.
• Access asymmetry is the biggest bias. Cayman — the second-largest domicile on the ADV lens — publishes no accessible name list (reCAPTCHA, no bulk); Jersey publishes aggregates without names; Guernsey publishes partially. Any "searchable funds by domicile" statistic structurally under-represents exactly the offshore centres it is most interesting for.

The gotcha, then: the most quoted fund-domicile statistics are the ones easiest to scrape, not the ones closest to true — and the two best-hidden registers (Cayman and Jersey) belong to two of the most successful domiciles. When a league table shows Cayman with fewer funds than Ireland, it is measuring publication policy, not market share. Every number above tells you which of the two it is measuring.