Founded in 1977 (under earlier names) and claiming 11.3 acres near Dayton, Nevada, Molossia is one of the longest-running and best-known American micronations, complete with its own currency, railroad, and self-declared state of war with the former East Germany. Its founder, Kevin Baugh, is admirably candid about the reality: he continues to pay property taxes on the land to Storey County, Nevada - which he jokingly calls "foreign aid" to the United States. Molossia and its residents are fully subject to US federal tax law and Nevada state law; see the United States page for the actual applicable rates.
Founded in 2021 by radio DJ Randy Williams on an 11-acre plot of desert land he purchased for USD 19,000 in Imperial County, Southern California, Slowjamastan has a border post and a self-proclaimed "Sultan" but no permanent residents or structures. The land and anyone conducting activity there remain fully subject to US federal and California state tax law; see the United States page.
A plot of Utah desert purchased on eBay for USD 610 by Brooklyn sculptor Zachary Landsburg, Zaqistan has no inhabitants - just large-scale installation art. It remains ordinary privately-owned real property under US federal and Utah state tax law; see the United States page.
Declared in 1982 by the city of Key West, Florida, in a tongue-in-cheek protest against a US Border Patrol checkpoint that disrupted local tourism, the Conch Republic is essentially the city of Key West itself, still governed and taxed entirely as an ordinary part of Florida and the United States; see the United States page.
Founded in the late 1970s in Milwaukee, Wisconsin by a teenager who invented an entire constructed language for his invented kingdom, Talossa today exists mainly as an online community with citizens worldwide rather than a claim over specific physical land its founder controls. To the extent any Talossan citizen or activity has a real physical location, it is taxed entirely under the ordinary law of that person's actual country of residence - most originally under US federal and Wisconsin state law; see the United States page.
Declared in 1971 by squatters and countercultural activists in a former military area of Christianshavn, Copenhagen, Christiania has functioned for decades as a semi-autonomous commune with its own informal rules, distinctive architecture, and (historically) an openly-tolerated cannabis market on its famous Pusher Street. Despite this real, functioning self-governance, Christiania has never been recognized as sovereign or separate from Denmark - it sits within Copenhagen Municipality with its own postal code (1440 Copenhagen K) and ISO country code of DNK, like any other Danish neighborhood. Following a 2011 settlement, Christiania's residents collectively purchased the land and became its legal owners in 2012, but remain fully subject to Danish tax law - income tax, VAT, and all other Danish taxes apply to Christiania residents exactly as they do to any other resident of Copenhagen. See the Denmark page for the actual applicable rates.
Claimed since 1944 by a group of Copenhagen schoolteachers on a small island in the Roskilde Fjord, north of Roskilde on Zealand, Elleore is one of the oldest continuously-running micronations in the world, complete with its own currency and postage stamps used during an annual summer gathering. The island and any activity there remain fully subject to Danish tax law; see the Denmark page.
A bohemian, artist-heavy neighborhood in central Vilnius, Uzupis declared itself an independent republic on April Fools' Day 1997, complete with its own tongue-in-cheek 41-article constitution (including the right "to be happy" and "to be unhappy") and an "army" of around a dozen people. It remains, in every legal sense, an ordinary district of Vilnius, Lithuania, fully subject to Lithuanian tax law; see the Lithuania page.
The village of Seborga, in the Liguria region of Italy near the French border, has asserted since 1963 that a historical oversight in Napoleonic-era territorial settlements at the Congress of Vienna means it was never legally incorporated into the modern Italian state - a claim never accepted by Italy and without any recognized legal basis. Seborga has its own elected "Prince," a currency called the Luigino, and a customs post, but operates comfortably within (and is fully taxed under) ordinary Italian law; see the Italy page.
Declared in 2004 by artist Paul Delprat in the Sydney suburb of Mosman, following a 20-year, ultimately unsuccessful planning dispute with the local council over a driveway, Wy remains ordinary Australian and New South Wales real property, fully subject to Australian tax law; see the Australia page.
Founded in 1981 and based in New South Wales, Atlantium describes itself as "primarily non-territorial" - a secular, pluralist project and lobby group rather than a genuine claim to displace Australian sovereignty over any specific land. Its members and any activity connected to it remain fully subject to ordinary Australian tax law; see the Australia page.
Declared in 2013 by Fred Hooper, the Murrawarri Republic asserts Indigenous Australian sovereignty over roughly 82,000 sq km straddling the New South Wales-Queensland border (an area an academic study found to be significantly overstated relative to the true extent of traditional Murrawarri country, closer to 22,000 sq km). Unlike the tongue-in-cheek entries above, this is a genuine assertion of unceded Aboriginal sovereignty predating British colonization, tied to a real and ongoing debate about Indigenous land rights in Australia - not a joke or an art project. It has not been recognized by Australia or any other government, and Australian federal and state tax law continues to apply as a matter of the law currently in force, whatever the underlying justice of the historical claim; see the Australia page. This guide takes no position on the merits of the underlying sovereignty claim - only on which tax law currently applies as a matter of positive law.
Sealand occupies HM Fort Roughs, a WWII-era anti-aircraft platform in the North Sea, occupied since 1967 by the family of the late Paddy Roy Bates. At the time of occupation, the platform sat in international waters outside the UK's then 3-nautical-mile territorial sea. In 1987, the UK extended its territorial waters to 12 nautical miles - a change that places Sealand's location within what the UK now claims as its own territorial sea, though the UK has historically declined to actively assert sovereignty or tax jurisdiction over the platform itself. This makes Sealand's status genuinely more legally ambiguous than the other entries on this page: as a matter of the UK's own stated territorial-waters claim, Sealand sits inside British waters, but decades of non-enforcement mean no actual UK tax has ever been collected there. See the United Kingdom page for the tax rates that would apply to the extent UK jurisdiction were ever actively asserted.
Liberland claims roughly 7 sq km of uninhabited Danube floodplain (locally called Gornja Siga) that fell into a jurisdictional gap after Croatia and Serbia failed to agree on their shared border following Yugoslavia's breakup - Croatia does not administer the specific plot Liberland claims, while Serbia does not actively assert a claim to it either, a genuine (if narrow) terra nullius gap. Founded in 2015 by Czech activist Vit Jedlicka on explicitly libertarian, low-tax principles, Liberland has never been recognized by any UN member state, has no permanent residents or economic activity on the ground, and Croatia actively prevents entry to the site, treating unauthorized visits as illegal border crossings. Because no country currently administers or taxes this specific parcel in practice, there is no clean answer to "which country's tax law applies here" the way there is for every other entry on this page - this is a genuine, narrow jurisdictional gap rather than a settled answer this guide is simply declining to state.
Founded in 1992 by Swedish artists Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Leif Elggren, Elgaland-Vargaland claims sovereignty over every border zone between every country on Earth, the waters up to 10 nautical miles beyond every country's territorial sea, and even "mental and perceptive territories" such as dream states - explicitly framed by its founders as a conceptual art project questioning the nature of borders and statehood, not a genuine territorial claim. Because it does not claim any single, identifiable physical location, there is no way to name one applicable tax jurisdiction; any real economic activity by an "Elgaland-Vargaland citizen" remains taxed under the law of wherever that person actually is.
Westarctica claims Marie Byrd Land, a large sector of West Antarctica that - genuinely unusually among Antarctic territory - has never been formally claimed by any of the seven countries with recognized Antarctic territorial claims (Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom), making it one of the only pieces of land on Earth that is truly terra nullius in a strict legal sense. However, the 1959 Antarctic Treaty (to which Westarctica is not a party) suspends all territorial claims across Antarctica for its signatories and prohibits new claims by treaty parties, and Marie Byrd Land has no permanent population or economic activity of any kind. There is accordingly no real tax jurisdiction to identify here at all - not because of an oversight, but because no government, including Westarctica itself, actually taxes anyone there.
Declared in 2014 by Greenpeace as a media awareness campaign protesting mining activity near Andean glaciers, the Glacier Republic exploited a genuine regulatory gap in glacier-sovereignty law along the Chile-Argentina border. It was explicitly conceived as an advocacy stunt rather than an ongoing self-governing project, has no residents, and no economic activity has ever occurred there under its name; there is no applicable tax jurisdiction to identify.
Asgardia claims sovereignty over the physical space occupied by Asgardia-1, a small satellite its founders launched into Earth orbit in 2018, styling itself a "space nation." It has no land territory anywhere on Earth and no population physically present in its claimed territory (the satellite is unmanned). There is no applicable terrestrial tax jurisdiction to identify - any real economic activity by an "Asgardian citizen" remains taxed under the ordinary law of wherever that person actually lives on Earth, and outer space itself is governed by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits national territorial claims of the kind Asgardia asserts.
None of the entities above are sovereign states, and nothing on this page should be read as suggesting otherwise. This guide includes them for completeness and because people genuinely do ask "so what taxes would apply there?" - and for most of them, the honest, useful answer is simply the tax law of whichever real, recognized country actually has legal jurisdiction over that land, linked above. A handful (Liberland, Elgaland-Vargaland, Westarctica, Glacier Republic, Asgardia) are genuine edge cases - disputed, unclaimed, non-territorial, or conceptual - where no clean single answer exists, and this page says so plainly rather than forcing a false certainty.