The tax premise the captive was partly built on
Many offshore captives were justified, in part, on tax efficiency. A captive in a low-tax centre let a group fund its own retained risk, accumulate reserves and earn investment income in a jurisdiction with a low effective rate. The risk-management logic was real, but the tax arithmetic was part of the spreadsheet that got the captive approved.
That part of the spreadsheet is what Pillar Two changes. The OECD's global minimum tax sets a 15 percent minimum effective tax rate for multinational groups with consolidated revenue above EUR 750 million, and imposes a top-up tax wherever a jurisdiction's effective rate falls below 15 percent. The point of a low-tax domicile was the low rate; Pillar Two is designed precisely to claw that advantage back.
For an in-scope Indian group with an offshore captive, the question is direct: if the captive's domicile no longer delivers a sub-15-percent outcome after top-up tax, does the captive still make sense? This post works through the mechanics and arrives at an answer that is more nuanced than simply abandoning captives.
How the top-up tax reaches a low-tax captive
To see the effect on a captive, follow the mechanism rather than the headline.
Pillar Two computes a group's effective tax rate jurisdiction by jurisdiction. Where the effective rate in a jurisdiction is below 15 percent, a top-up tax is charged to bring the group's burden on that income up to 15 percent. So a captive sitting in a centre with a very low or nil rate no longer enjoys that low rate net of the group; the difference is collected as top-up tax elsewhere in the group.
The practical reading for a captive owner:
- The rate gap narrows toward zero. Whatever sub-15-percent advantage the domicile offered is largely neutralised once the group is in scope, so the tax case thins.
- The captive's income is now in the group's global computation, which adds compliance work regardless of where the top-up lands.
- The non-tax rationale comes to the front, because once the rate advantage is neutralised, the captive has to justify itself on risk, capacity and control rather than on rate.
Insurance-specific guidance and safe harbours
Insurance is not an afterthought in the Pillar Two design, which matters for how a captive is actually computed.
The OECD has issued administrative guidance addressing scope, income and tax-computation issues specific to insurance companies, and certain safe harbours apply to insurance. The detail is technical and group-specific, but the implication for a captive owner is that the analysis cannot be done with a generic Pillar Two model: the insurance-specific rules and any applicable safe harbour have to be applied to the captive's own figures.
This is where adviser input is essential and where a broad-brush conclusion can mislead. A captive that looks fully exposed under a simple model may sit within a safe harbour, or its insurance income may be computed differently than a quick estimate suggests. The honest position for a broker is to flag that Pillar Two reshapes the captive tax case, then route the precise quantification to tax advisers applying the insurance guidance, rather than asserting a specific top-up figure.
Indian timing and the case that survives the tax change
Two facts shape how urgently an Indian group should act. First, India has not fully implemented the global minimum tax and is taking a cautious, evaluative approach, which leaves timing uncertainty for in-scope Indian groups. Second, in January 2026, 147 Inclusive Framework jurisdictions agreed a Side-by-Side package on the global minimum tax, signalling the framework is advancing rather than stalling.
Read together: the direction of travel is settled even though India's own implementation timing is not. An in-scope Indian group should treat Pillar Two as a coming reality and stress-test its captive against it now, while recognising the precise domestic timing is still being decided.
The captive case that survives this change is the one that never rested mainly on tax:
- Retained-risk financing, where the group prefers to fund predictable losses itself rather than pay an external premium loaded for the insurer's margin.
- Capacity and access, where the captive reaches reinsurance markets or fills cover that the commercial market prices poorly or will not write.
- Data and control, where consolidating the group's risk in one vehicle produces the loss data, retention discipline and bargaining position that improve the whole risk programme.
None of these depends on a sub-15-percent rate, so none is undone by the top-up tax. What Pillar Two does is strip away the tax veneer and force the captive to stand on its risk-management substance.
GIFT City as the substance-rich alternative
If the captive must now justify itself on substance rather than rate, the domicile question changes shape, and India's own onshore option moves into view.
GIFT City offers an onshore Indian captive route under IFSCA, where the captive sits within the Indian regulatory perimeter rather than in a distant low-tax centre. For an in-scope group already absorbing the compliance weight of Pillar Two, an onshore captive with genuine local substance, regulatory recognition and proximity to the group's actual risks can be more defensible than an offshore vehicle whose main remaining feature, the low rate, has been neutralised.
The argument is not that GIFT City is a tax dodge, which would miss the point of Pillar Two entirely. It is that once tax arbitrage is off the table, the decision turns on substance, regulatory standing and operational fit, and an onshore captive can score well on exactly those. A group should weigh its existing offshore captive against an onshore alternative on the post-tax-change criteria, not the pre-change ones.
Whichever domicile a group lands on, the captive's value is realised through the covers it writes and retains, and that depends on understanding the wordings, retentions and reinsurance terms behind them. Sarvada gives commercial insurance brokers structured, searchable access to insurer policy wordings and the intelligence around them, so a broker advising on a captive's risk-financing case can ground the retained-risk and reinsurance decisions in real wording detail rather than tax assumptions alone. Request Access to build the captive case on substance.