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Capital gains tax treats a gift as a sale you were never paid for

Fahad ZarCrypto tax accountant. MSc Accounting and Finance, BPP University London. Four years reconciling wallet and exchange histories for UK and US filings.

Published 25 August 2026· Reviewed against gov.uk 25 August 2026· 4 min read·Capital gains tax

The instinct says no money changed hands, so there is nothing to tax. Capital gains tax says otherwise. Giving away an asset is a disposal at its market value on the day of the gift, and the gain is calculated exactly as if you had sold it for that figure, per GOV.UK. Gift shares worth £30,000 that cost you £10,000 and you have made a £20,000 gain, payable in real money, on a transaction that produced none.

That is the general rule. The two exemptions that matter sit either side of it.

A gift moves the asset and leaves the tax behind with you. Price that before the gift, not after.

The spouse exemption, and its edges

Transfers to your husband, wife or civil partner are free of capital gains tax. No gain arises, whatever the asset is worth. The two edges are separation, the exemption fails if you separated and did not live together at all in that tax year, and business stock, goods given for their business to sell on are outside it.

The exemption defers rather than deletes. Your spouse takes over your original cost, and when they eventually sell, their gain runs all the way back to what you first paid, or to the 31 March 1982 market value for assets held before then. Between the gift and the sale sits the planning, two allowances and two sets of rate bands, which is why moving assets between spouses before a sale is the oldest legitimate move in the book, and it works for crypto exactly as it works for shares.

The charity exemption

Assets given outright to charity carry no capital gains tax. The one wrinkle is a sale to a charity at undervalue, sell for more than you paid but less than market value and the gain is computed on what the charity actually paid you. Donating appreciated assets rather than cash is often the more efficient gift for exactly this reason.

Gifts to children and everyone else

There is no family discount beyond marriage. A gift to a child, a sibling or a friend is a full disposal at market value, and the tax falls on you, the giver, in the year of the gift. The recipient starts fresh at market value for their own future gains. For assets that cannot be split, this can create a tax bill with no cash to pay it from, which is a timing problem worth planning for rather than discovering, especially where the payment clock is the fast property one.

Gifts also live alongside inheritance tax, a gift that fails the seven year rule can be counted for both regimes at different values. Where estates are in play, the inheritance interaction is the other half of the sum, and holding an appreciated asset until death, when the base cost uplifts to probate value, is sometimes the better answer than gifting it in life.