Crypto tax
2026-27How this is worked out
⚠ There is no crypto tax. There is Capital Gains Tax, and a cryptoasset is an asset like any other — so this page uses exactly the same calculation as the Capital Gains calculator, deliberately.
⚠ Swapping one coin for another is a disposal
Even though no money changed hands and nothing reached your bank. You have disposed of one asset and acquired another, and the gain is measured in pounds at that moment. So is spending crypto on something, and so is gifting it to anyone other than a spouse.
This is the single most expensive misunderstanding in the area: people who never cashed out to a bank account can owe tax on hundreds of disposals they did not think of as sales.
It is not gambling, and it is not usually trading
HMRC's position is that buying and selling cryptoassets is investment, not gambling — so gains are chargeable. It is also only very rarely trading, which people sometimes hope for because losses would then be more useful; the bar for that is high and being active is not enough.
Pooling, and the two matching rules
Your holding of each token is a single pool with an average cost — you do not choose which coins you sold. But disposals are matched first against anything acquired the same day, then against acquisitions in the following thirty days, and only then against the pool.
⚠ Those rules exist to stop selling and rebuying to crystallise a loss, and they catch ordinary rebalancing too. This page works on the pooled figures you supply; it does not do the matching for you, and with frequent trading that matching is most of the work.
What this does not cover
Staking, mining, airdrops and lending rewards, which are income when received and only then enter a pool at that value. Income tax on tokens received from employment. DeFi, where whether a transaction is a disposal at all is genuinely unsettled. Losses on tokens that have become worthless, which need a negligible value claim. Non-fungible tokens, which are not pooled because each is a separate asset. And the 60-day reporting deadline, which does not apply here but does to property.
Where these figures come from
Every rate above is read from a dated rate file rather than written into the page, and each one is checked against the gov.uk page it came from. How these numbers are kept right sets out the whole process.
Capital Gains Tax calculator