Capital Gains Tax on crypto disposals.
CGT on crypto
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Taxable gain after exemption
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Net gain kept
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Your breakdown
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When a disposal becomes taxable
HMRC treats most cryptoassets held by individuals as investments, which means Capital Gains Tax, not Income Tax, applies when you dispose of them. The word disposal does a lot of work here. It is not just selling for pounds. Swapping one token for another is a disposal. Spending crypto on goods or services is a disposal. Gifting it to anyone other than your spouse or civil partner is a disposal. Each one crystallises a gain or loss measured against what you originally paid, and this calculator estimates the tax for the 2026/27 year on the total of those gains.
The tool is built for the individual investor who has been trading or holding through the year and now needs a realistic figure for their Self Assessment return. It is not for someone whose activity is so frequent and organised that HMRC would treat it as a trade, which is rare, nor does it cover income-type crypto, which is handled differently and explained below.
The £3,000 allowance and the two rates
Everyone has a Capital Gains Tax annual exempt amount, and for 2026/27 it sits at £3,000. Your total gains for the year are reduced by that amount before any tax is charged. What remains is taxed at 18 percent to the extent it falls within your remaining basic-rate band, and at 24 percent above it. The rate you pay therefore depends on your other income, because that income uses up the basic-rate band first. A higher earner whose salary already fills the band pays the full 24 percent on their whole taxable gain.
Where the basic-rate band runs out is the pivot. The band tops out at £50,270 of total taxable income for 2026/27, the same figure UK-wide, and the tool measures how much of it your income leaves free before stacking the gain on top.
£20,000 of gains on a £40,000 salary
Take the defaults: £20,000 of net crypto gains for the year alongside £40,000 of other taxable income. The first £3,000 of the gain is exempt, leaving £17,000 taxable. Income of £40,000 leaves £10,270 of the basic-rate band free, so that slice of the gain is taxed at 18 percent and the rest at 24.
The bill is £3,464, leaving £16,536 of the original gain in your pocket. If your salary had been £55,000, the whole £17,000 would be taxed at 24 percent, raising the bill to £4,080. The interaction with your income is real money, not a rounding detail.
The record HMRC expects you to keep
Crypto gains are not calculated trade by trade in isolation. HMRC requires a pooled cost basis, the same share-pooling approach used for shares. Every unit of a given token goes into a single pool, and your average cost per unit is the pool total divided by the number of units held. When you sell, the cost you deduct is the average, not the price of any specific coin. Two anti-avoidance rules sit on top: the same-day rule and the thirty-day rule, which match disposals against any reacquisition of the same token on the same day or within the following thirty days, to stop people selling and instantly rebuying just to bank a loss. Enter your already-computed net gain into the tool; it does not pool the transactions for you.
A practical tip: track everything as you go, including the sterling value at the moment of each swap, because reconstructing a year of activity across several exchanges at filing time is miserable and error-prone. Good portfolio software that exports an HMRC-format report pays for itself.
Is staking or mining taxed the same way?
No, and this tool does not cover it. Rewards from staking, mining, and most airdrops are normally Income Tax, valued in sterling at the date you receive them, and added to your other income. If you later sell those coins, a separate Capital Gains Tax calculation applies to any change in value since receipt. So a staking reward can be taxed twice in effect, once as income on receipt and again as a gain on disposal, on two different measures.
Do Scottish income tax rates change my crypto CGT?
No. Capital Gains Tax is a reserved tax, so the 18 and 24 percent rates and the £50,270 basic-rate band boundary apply to a Scottish taxpayer exactly as they do elsewhere in the UK. Scotland's separate income tax bands affect the tax on your salary, but they do not move the point at which your crypto gain tips from 18 to 24 percent.