TURKS & CAICOS: An Introduction to General Business Law

The general perception of small British territories in the Caribbean is that their economies are dominated by financial services. In the case of the Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI), that is not true. TCI has a modest, though revenue-significant, financial services industry primarily servicing high net worth individuals and their international advisors, along with a niche captive insurance sector. However, TCI’s economy has long been dominated by its highly successful luxury hospitality and tourism industry, and that industry’s by-products: construction and upscale vacation home construction and sales.

That sector of TCI’s economy has boomed in the last ten years, and especially since Covid, as affluent international families have flocked to the territory to invest in lavish villas and condominiums. This has produced a thriving market for the TCI legal services industry in the provision of corporate, commercial, transactional and legal-structuring services to TCI and international developers servicing that market, and to international buyers investing in those villas and condominiums.

At the supply level, that industry continues to thrive in 2025. Though visitor numbers have slowed a little in the face of political and economic uncertainty in the territory’s main feeder markets – the USA, Canada and Europe – the enthusiasm of hospitality developers to invest in TCI has continued unbated. There are at present six major luxury resorts under construction on Providenciales (typically called “Provo”), TCI’s tourist and commercial hub, along with many smaller luxury villa and condominium projects. This is understandable when TCI’s hospitality industry has consistently outperformed its competitor destinations in the region: in a standard hospitality industry metric, RevPAR (revenue per available room), TCI has routinely been well ahead other Caribbean markets. That is very enticing for resort developers.

Nevertheless, there are some headwinds. Infrastructure has struggled to keep pace with all of this development. Thus, in a turn of events that was unimaginable until recently, Provo now has traffic problems, as its main spine road struggles to cope with the number of vehicles, particularly at peak times. Moreover, Howard Hamilton International Airport on Provo, TCI’s main gateway to the outside world, is in need of a new terminal: currently, on busy weekends, facilities for incoming and outgoing passengers often struggle to cope.

As a result of the huge expansion in the luxury hospitality economy of TCI in recent years, there has been significant immigration to the territory to service local employment demands in tourism and construction, and of their attendant service providers. The indigenous population of TCI is small and is now substantially outnumbered by foreign nationals. This in turn has led to growing political pressure to limit both immigration, and foreign participation in the economy at the level of small and medium enterprises (there is no appreciable resistance, as yet, to foreign investment in large-scale projects that require major capital). Given the labour-intensive nature of luxury tourism and construction, the modest size of the indigenous labour-pool, and the minimal levels of indigenous unemployment in TCI, such constraints can be expected to be a drag on future growth.

On a related point, TCI has long been an attractive locale for vacation-home ownership. That has led to the presence of a significant number of affluent winter dwellers whose presence has been welcomed, and the servicing of whose needs provides a significant boost to the local economy. The acquisition of long-term residence rights (including permanent residence) for such dwellers has always been a straightforward, if bureaucratically cumbersome, process. However, there has been a concern in recent times that the investment requirements for long-term or permanent residence have been diluted by house-price inflation such that that type of residence has, in real terms, become much more freely available. Given that several of the categories of such residence allow the holder the right to work, there is now understandable indigenous pressure to increase the levels of investment required to qualify for such longer-term or permanent residency.

Like many countries in the region, TCI has sought to attract large-scale foreign direct investment by giving fiscal concessions to major investors (typically to developers of major hospitality projects). Given the continuing boom in such projects on Provo and the consequent infrastructural strains already described, it is expected that those concessions may become more limited, with a view to encouraging the redirection of that type of investment to the other less developed islands in the territory.

TCI’s financial services industry has recently benefited from the belated recognition on the part of the TCI government that having all of the economy’s eggs in the tourism and construction baskets was probably risky. Thus, TCI Finance, a promotional body for the TCI financial services industry has recently been established and publicly funded. There has been focus on parlaying the territory’s success in attracting affluent foreign winter dwellers into an expansion of the financial services industry by the provision of private wealth and related services to that clientele and their international advisors.

TCI’s legislative framework in the private wealth financial services area is comparable to its regional competitors like the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands (BVI). TCI’s regulatory framework is required to comply with the ever-increasing international standards, and like Cayman and BVI, it has recently enacted changes to its companies legislation allowing for disclosure of beneficial ownership, subject to some limitations.

In short, TCI’s economy continues to grow substantially, to attract major foreign investment, and to provide the services that that foreign investment needs. However, this success has produced some growing pains, resulting in legal and policy changes that may render its favourable inward investment climate a little more challenging than in the recent past.