How crypto is taxed in the UK
Two taxes apply. Capital Gains Tax on disposals, calculated under HMRC Share Pooling with the same-day and 30-day rules. Income Tax on crypto you earn. Almost every question below comes down to which one applies.
Capital Gains Tax on crypto
Rates, the annual allowance, Share Pooling and the 30-day rule, with worked examples.
Staking rewards
Taxed as income at receipt, then capital gains on disposal. How to report both.
Mining income
Hobby versus business, allowable costs, and how HMRC treats mined coins.
Airdrops
Income at receipt or capital gains only, depending on why you received them.
Getting paid in crypto
Salary or freelance income in crypto, taxed at receipt then again on disposal.
Moving between wallets
Not a taxable event, but it destroys your cost basis if the transfer is unmatched.
The rates and allowances for 2025 to 2026
Capital gains on crypto are taxed at 18 per cent inside your basic rate band and 24 per cent above it, after the first £3,000 of gains each year, which is the annual exempt amount. The higher rate line sits at £50,270 of income plus gains, so the same disposal can straddle both rates. These figures were checked against HMRC’s published rates on 25 August 2026, a sentence you will not find on most of the guides ranking beside this one.
Income from crypto, which covers staking, mining, most airdrops and being paid in tokens, is taxed at your income tax rates instead, at the sterling value on the day it arrives. The £1,000 trading and miscellaneous income allowance can cover small amounts. Between £1,000 and £2,500 means telling HMRC, and above £2,500 means a return.
One transition still catches people filing older years. Disposals before 30 October 2024 carried 10 and 20 per cent rates, so a 2024 to 2025 return has two rate regimes inside a single year depending on the disposal date.
What counts as a taxable event
Selling for pounds is the obvious one. The four that surprise people are swapping one token for another, which is a disposal of the first token at its sterling value that day, spending crypto on anything, gifting it to anyone except your spouse or civil partner, and receiving tokens from staking, mining or airdrops, which is income on arrival. Moving coins between your own wallets is not a disposal, though your software will frequently miscount it as one.
The deeper corners each have their own guide on this site, DeFi, liquidity pools, NFTs, lending, wrapping and bridging, gifts, salary in crypto and company holdings. This page carries the rules that decide every one of them.
Pooling and the matching rules, with numbers
HMRC does not let you pick which coins you sold. Each token has a single Section 104 pool holding the average cost of everything you have bought, and disposals match against acquisitions in a fixed order. Same day purchases first, then anything bought in the next 30 days, then the pool. The rules are set out in HMRC’s cryptoassets guidance, and here is what they do to a real sequence.
You bought 2 ETH at £1,500 and later 1 ETH at £3,000. Your pool holds 3 ETH at a cost of £6,000, an average of £2,000 each, and the price you happen to remember paying for any particular coin stopped mattering the day it entered the pool. You sell 1 ETH for £2,800. The gain is £800 against the pooled average, not £1,300 against your first purchase and not nothing against your last. Now suppose you buy 1 ETH back nine days later at £2,900. The 30 day rule rewrites the sale to match that buyback instead, the gain becomes a £100 loss, and the pool is restored as if the sale had barely happened. Two identical portfolios, £900 of tax difference, decided entirely by a rule most filers have never heard of.
Every disposal in your history goes through this, token by token, which is why a year of active trading produces a computation no spreadsheet survives and why reconciliation is where the real work lives.
The SA108 crypto boxes, walked through
Since the 2024 to 2025 return, cryptoassets have had their own section on the SA108 capital gains pages, boxes 13.1 to 13.8. Almost no guide walks them, so here is each box and what actually goes in it.
Box 13.1 takes the number of disposals, where a hundred swaps are a hundred disposals, not one. Box 13.2 takes total proceeds in sterling and 13.3 the allowable costs including what you paid, which is where the pooled figures land. Boxes 13.4 and 13.5 split your gains before losses from your losses, so both sides show, not just the net. Box 13.6 carries claim and election codes, negligible value claims among them. Boxes 13.7 and 13.8 exist for gains already reported through the real time service and the tax already paid on them, so nothing gets counted twice. Everything in pounds, valued on the day of each event.
If you are not otherwise in Self Assessment, gains can go through the real time service by 31 December after the tax year instead, and the full walkthrough of both routes is in how to report crypto to HMRC. Deadlines and registration dates live in the deadlines guide.
Where the software gets it wrong
Crypto tax software applies the rules above mechanically to whatever data it holds, and the data is nearly always incomplete. A deposit with no matching withdrawal becomes a zero cost basis warning, and filing it that way taxes the entire sale as gain. A transfer between your own wallets becomes a phantom disposal. A dead exchange leaves a hole the pool average quietly absorbs in the wrong direction. The reports look finished. The numbers inside them are drafts.
We spend most of our week inside these files, and the honest summary is that the software is good at arithmetic and bad at knowing what is missing. Our own crypto tax calculator runs the genuine matching rules on real transaction data and is free, and when a report needs a professional rebuild the free review will tell you what state yours is in before you commit to anything.
Where HMRC rules get complicated
This is where crypto tax software fails and where a specialist earns their fee. Each of these has its own HMRC treatment.
DeFi tax
Lending, staking, liquidity and yield, and the line between income and gains.
Liquidity pools
Entering and exiting a pool can each be a disposal. LP tokens and rewards.
Lending & interest
CeFi and DeFi lending, when the loan itself triggers a taxable disposal.
Margin & futures
When derivatives are capital gains, when income, and why reports get it wrong.
Wrapping & bridging
Whether wrapping or bridging is a disposal, and how to stay on the safe side.
NFTs
Capital Gains for holders, Income Tax for creators and traders.
Nudge letters, CARF and disclosure
HMRC already receives data from UK exchanges, and CARF widens it from 2026. If you have unreported gains, coming forward first almost always costs less.
HMRC nudge letters
What the letter means, what not to do, and how to respond before the deadline.
CARF explained
The reporting framework that shares your exchange data with HMRC from 2026.
Does Coinbase report?
What UK exchanges share with HMRC, and what it means for you.
Voluntary disclosure
How to disclose unpaid crypto tax to HMRC and what to expect on penalties.
Penalties
What late filing, late payment and undeclared gains actually cost.
Deadlines 2026
Registration, the 31 January deadline, and what happens if you miss it.
Losses, dead coins and the four year clock
Losses offset gains in the same year automatically, and unused losses carry forward indefinitely, but only if HMRC is told about them within four years of the end of the tax year they arose in. A loss nobody claimed does not exist. For tokens that collapsed to nothing while you still hold them, a negligible value claim crystallises the loss without a sale, and the losses guide covers both routes with the deadlines attached.
Theft is the exception people do not expect. Stolen coins are usually not a disposal, because HMRC’s view is that you still own the asset, so theft alone produces no loss relief. The workarounds that do exist are in reporting stolen cryptocurrency.
The records HMRC expects
Per disposal, the token, the date, the quantity, the sterling value and the fees, kept for at least five years after the filing deadline. Exchange exports disappear when platforms die, so download yearly rather than hoping. The practical setup that survives an enquiry is in the record keeping guide, and it takes an evening to build.
Reliefs HMRC actually allows
Not avoidance. These are the legitimate reliefs and allowances most crypto holders never claim.
Reduce your crypto tax
Allowance, loss harvesting, spouse transfers, pensions and timing.
Loss harvesting
Cut gains with realised losses, without falling foul of the 30-day rule.
Gifting crypto
When a gift is a disposal, and the spouse exemption that is not.
Inheritance tax
How crypto sits in your estate at 40 percent, and the planning that helps.
Moving abroad
Temporary non-residence and the five-year rule that pulls gains back.
Donating to charity
CGT-free disposals and the Income Tax relief on crypto donations.
Rather have a specialist handle all of it? See our crypto tax accountants, the full crypto tax service, or start with crypto reconciliation if your Koinly numbers look wrong.
Questions people ask about UK crypto tax
How much tax will I pay on my crypto?
On gains, 18 per cent inside your basic rate band and 24 per cent above it, after the £3,000 allowance. On crypto income, your normal income tax rates on the value at receipt. Where the gain sits relative to the £50,270 line decides the split, so the same gain costs different amounts at different salaries.
Do I pay tax on crypto if I never sell for pounds?
Holding is not taxed, but you do not need to touch pounds to owe tax. Swapping tokens, spending them and gifting them are all disposals at sterling value, and staking or mining rewards are income the day they arrive. Most surprise tax bills come from years of swaps nobody priced at the time.
Do exchanges report me to HMRC?
Yes. HMRC has taken bulk data from exchanges under information notices for years, and since January 2026 platforms collect user and transaction data under CARF, with the first automatic reports landing by 31 May 2027 and a £300 penalty for users who refuse their details. The enforcement arithmetic is in our crackdown analysis.
Can HMRC track my crypto?
On exchanges, directly through data sharing. On chain, blockchains are public ledgers and HMRC uses analytics tooling like every other tax authority. The 81,000 nudge letters sent last tax year were generated by matching that data against returns, so the working assumption should be that the accounts are already known.
What if I have years I never reported?
Old years go through a disclosure rather than a late return, and coming forward unprompted is dramatically cheaper than waiting for the letter. The process and its 90 day clock are in disclosing unpaid crypto tax.
Where we work
We serve crypto investors across the whole UK remotely, with dedicated pages for the cities we hear from most.