Crypto Tax Calculator UK Trending

HMRC treats cryptocurrency as a taxable asset rather than as currency, so Capital Gains Tax applies when you sell, swap, gift or spend crypto at a profit. For the 2026/27 tax year the annual exempt amount is £3,000, much reduced from the £12,300 available in 2022/23, and gains above it are taxed at 18% if you are a basic-rate taxpayer or 24% if you pay the higher or additional rate. Those unified rates have applied since the October 2024 Budget. NFTs count as assets on the same footing, and the pseudo-anonymous nature of a blockchain does not make any of it untaxable.

A disposal is wider than most people expect. Selling for fiat such as pounds, dollars or euros counts, and so does swapping one coin for another, for instance ETH for BTC. Spending crypto on goods or services is a disposal at the sterling value on the day, and so is gifting it to anyone other than your spouse. Moving coins between wallets or exchanges you own yourself is not a disposal. Losses on disposal can be set against gains in the same year or carried forward indefinitely, although the claim itself has to be made within 4 years. Same-year losses are set off in full, while losses brought forward are used only to bring gains down to the £3,000 exempt amount, so the allowance is never wasted.

Working out the cost basis is where crypto tax gets fiddly. The UK uses share pooling, the same matching rules that apply to shares. Disposals are matched first against anything bought on the same day, then against purchases made in the following 30 days under the anti-bed-and-breakfasting rule, and only then against the Section 104 pool, which holds the weighted average cost of everything bought earlier. That average-cost approach differs from the FIFO and LIFO methods used in the United States, and most exchanges do not track it, so people generally reach for specialist software such as Koinly, CoinTracker or Recap.

Not everything is a capital gain. Mining and staking rewards are taxed as miscellaneous income at their sterling value on the day you receive them, and anything above the £1,000 trading allowance has to go on a Self Assessment return. Airdrops are income at receipt only if you got them in return for something, such as a service, or as part of a trade. A promotional airdrop you did nothing for carries no income tax, although CGT can still apply when you dispose of the tokens. Salary paid in crypto is employment income through PAYE, again with the sterling value at receipt setting the cost basis for any later gain. Play-to-earn rewards usually fall in with miscellaneous income.

On the reporting side, you have to fill in the capital gains pages of a Self Assessment return if the assets you disposed of in the year were worth more than £50,000 in total, if your gains before losses came to more than the £3,000 annual exempt amount, or if you want to claim a loss, even where losses or the exemption wipe out the tax. Gains for 2026/27 go on a return due by 31 January 2028, with payment on the same date, although the Real Time Capital Gains Tax service lets you report and pay sooner. Miss the filing date and the penalty is £100 immediately, then £10 a day after 3 months, on top of slabs of 5%, 10% and 15% of the unpaid tax.

Secrecy is disappearing. Under the OECD Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework, which extends the existing Common Reporting Standard to digital assets, exchanges and other crypto service providers in the UK have collected customer and transaction details since 1 January 2026 and must send HMRC their first annual report, covering 2026, by 31 May 2027. Providers in other signed-up countries report to their own tax authorities, which pass the data on. HMRC will therefore see your trades whether or not you declare them, which makes sitting on undeclared gains a poor bet. Anyone with unreported gains from earlier years is better off making a voluntary disclosure first, because an unprompted disclosure of a careless error more than a year old usually costs 10-30% of the tax, against 20-30% once HMRC comes to you, and 35-100% if the failure is treated as deliberate.