We came at this from the hardest end
Most accountants meet capital gains tax through a rental flat or a share portfolio. We built the practice on cryptoassets, where it is normal for someone to arrive with years of trading spread across several exchanges and wallets, no acquisition records worth the name, and a filing deadline already close.
That turns out to be useful training. A share disposal is the same calculation with better paperwork. Property is the same calculation with fewer moving parts and a tighter deadline. Once you can defend a crypto cost basis to HMRC, the rest of the capital gains world stops being intimidating.
So we take on capital gains work across the board, and we are honest about which parts are genuinely difficult and which parts a decent bookkeeper could handle.
What we handle
The same calculation underneath, with a different set of traps on top of each one.
Cryptoassets
Exchange trades, DeFi, staking withdrawals, NFTs, token swaps. The pooling rules bite hardest here and the software almost never applies them correctly. This is the work we do most.
Shares and funds
Employee schemes, accumulation funds where reinvested income lifts your base cost year after year, portfolios moved between platforms with the acquisition history left behind.
Second property and land
Buy to let, inherited houses, a plot sold off a garden. The 60 day reporting clock starts at completion, and most people find out about it late.
Business assets
Selling a company or a stake in one, goodwill, commercial premises. Business Asset Disposal Relief is worth checking properly rather than assuming.
Gifts and transfers
Giving an asset away is a disposal at market value unless it goes to your spouse or civil partner. That surprises people every year, usually after the fact.
Losses
A loss is not allowable until you quantify it and tell HMRC. You get four years from the end of the tax year to do that, and old bad years close for good once the window passes.
The numbers for 2026 to 2027
Two rates apply to individuals. Gains falling inside your remaining basic rate band are taxed at 18%. Anything above that is taxed at 24%. Your income is stacked first, so the same gain can straddle both rates, and a modest change in salary or dividends moves where the line falls. Trustees and personal representatives pay a flat 24%. Where Business Asset Disposal Relief applies, the rate is 18%. HMRC publishes the current position on its capital gains tax rates page.
The annual exempt amount is £3,000 for individuals and £1,500 for most trusts. It does not carry forward. Use it or lose it, which is why disposals sometimes want splitting across two tax years rather than bunching into one.
Deadlines differ by asset. Sell UK residential property and you must report and pay within 60 days of completion, separately from your tax return, with interest and penalties if you miss it. Everything else, crypto and shares included, goes through Self Assessment on the normal 31 January timetable.
If you want to see what that means for a specific disposal, our capital gains tax calculator splits a gain across both rates using your income. Those figures are current as at the date shown on this page. Rates and allowances have moved three times in recent years, so check before relying on anything written earlier.
Why a crypto gain is harder to calculate than a share gain
You do not get to pick which coins you sold. HMRC applies matching rules in a fixed order, set out across the Cryptoassets Manual at CRYPTO22250 onwards. Anything bought the same day is matched first. Anything bought in the following 30 days is matched next. Only then does the rest come out of your section 104 pool at average cost.
That third rule catches people constantly. Sell at a loss in a falling market, buy back the same token a fortnight later because the price looks good, and the loss you were counting on gets matched against the repurchase instead. It does not disappear. It just moves into the new holding and stops being available this year, which is precisely the year you needed it.
Now apply that across nine exchanges, several wallets and a few thousand trades, where the pool has to be tracked continuously per token, in pounds, at the exchange rate on each date. Portfolio trackers were built to show performance. Most of them were not built to survive an HMRC enquiry, and the gap between the two shows up as an inflated gain.
We fix that gap for a living. The detail sits on our crypto reconciliation page, and the wider UK rules are set out in our UK crypto tax guide.
What we usually find
A base cost of zero
When acquisition data is missing, software often treats the purchase price as nil and taxes the entire proceeds as gain. Reconstructing the real cost from bank records, exchange statements and on-chain history is the single biggest number we move.
Your own transfers taxed as sales
Moving an asset between two wallets you control is not a disposal. Import it badly and it looks like one, so the same holding gets taxed twice on its way to a single sale.
Allowable costs never claimed
Exchange fees, gas, broker commission, stamp duty on a purchase, legal and estate agent fees on a property. They reduce the gain and they are routinely left out because nobody went looking for them.
Losses sitting unclaimed
A loss you never told HMRC about does nothing for you. Under section 16(2A) TCGA 1992 a loss becomes allowable only once it is quantified and notified, and that window shuts four years after the end of the tax year it arose in. Claim it and it clears gains in the same year first, then carries forward with no expiry. We check the old years before touching the current one, because a forgotten loss from three years back is often worth more than anything we can do with this year’s return.
How the work runs
We start with a free review. You tell us what you sold and roughly when, and we tell you whether there is a reporting obligation, whether the number looks wrong, and what it would take to fix. Some of those conversations end with us saying you do not need us, which is a perfectly good outcome.
If there is work, you connect your own exchange accounts and we take it from there. We rebuild the cost basis, apply the matching rules properly, claim the costs and losses, and produce a computation you could hand to an inspector. Then we file it, either inside your Self Assessment return or through the 60 day property route.
If a previous return was wrong, that is fixable too, and it is far better to correct it before HMRC raises the question. They receive more exchange data every year.
We do not publish a fixed fee, because a single share sale and a four year crypto history are not the same job. You get a price before any work starts, and it does not move unless the scope does.
Questions we get asked
Do I need to report a gain under £3,000?
If your total gains for the year sit below the annual exempt amount and you are not already in Self Assessment, usually not. Check rather than assume though, because UK residential property carries its own 60 day reporting duty whatever the allowance does, and being inside Self Assessment for another reason changes the answer.
What does a capital gains tax accountant cost?
It depends on how much reconstruction the calculation needs. A clean share disposal with contract notes is straightforward. A crypto history spanning several years and a dozen platforms is a data project before it is a tax return. We quote after the free review, in writing, before starting.
Can you handle crypto and shares in the same return?
Yes, and they usually arrive together. Both sit in the capital gains pages of the same Self Assessment return, and both use the same pooling and matching rules, which is why the two are less separate than people expect.
I already filed and I think it was wrong. What now?
You can amend a recent return, and for older years there is a disclosure route. Correcting it yourself is treated very differently from HMRC finding it first, and the difference shows up in the penalty. Bring us the return and we will tell you which route applies.
Do you need to be local to me?
No. The work is data reconstruction and it happens on screen, so where you sit makes no difference to the outcome. We are London based and take clients across the UK.
Find out what you actually owe
Send us what you sold. We will tell you whether the number is right, whether you have a filing obligation, and what it would take to put it straight.
Holding crypto as well? See how we handle crypto tax specifically.