UK Crypto Tax Reporting Rules 2026

Introduction

A UK holder with 5 ETH bought across two purchases sells 2 of them. The proceeds are known to the penny. The cost is not, because there is no such thing as the cost of a particular coin: the 5 ETH are fungible, indistinguishable, and the question of which 2 left has no answer you can observe. It has an answer you compute.

Most of what is written about this subject starts from the wrong end. It describes methods — first in first out, highest in first out, average cost — as though a UK holder were choosing between them. A UK holder is not choosing. The computation is prescribed, it runs in a fixed order, and two of its three stages exist to stop a specific kind of arrangement rather than to describe ordinary trading.

Three features of the answer are worth holding on to before the detail. The order is what decides the number, not the rule you happen to have read about: a purchase caught by stage one produces a different gain from the same purchase caught by stage two, and nothing about the purchase has changed except the date. The pool follows the token rather than the venue, so three exchange histories are not three computations — they are one, and merging them is the step most reconstructions skip. And nothing here removes a gain; the stages decide which tax year accounts for it.

The page also carries its dates on its face. Every figure below is tagged to the 2026 to 2027 tax year, because a Capital Gains Tax figure with no year attached is not a fact about anything — and there is a Budget on 28 October 2026 between these figures and the filing deadline they relate to. A measure that is proposed rather than in force is labelled as proposed.

This page covers the mechanics and the reporting: how a disposal is matched, how the pool carries cost forward, what the 2026 to 2027 figures are, which Self Assessment deadlines apply to which tax year, and what the SA108 pages want from you. It is the depth behind the summary in our complete crypto tax guide, which remains the right starting point if you have not yet worked out whether you have a reporting obligation at all.

Two neighbouring subjects are deliberately not here: the wider family of cost-basis methods and which jurisdictions permit which, covered in the cost basis methods guide; and keeping the records that make any of this computable, handled in the records and reconstruction guide.

The Order HMRC Applies, and Why It Is an Order

HMRC's Cryptoassets Manual sets out three stages, and they run in sequence. A disposal is matched first against acquisitions made on the same day; then against acquisitions made in the thirty days after it; and only what is left over is matched against the pool. Each stage takes what it can and passes the remainder down.

Concretely: buy on the day you sell and stage one takes it. Buy three weeks later and stage two takes it. Buy five weeks later and it never touches that disposal at all — it joins the pool and affects the next one. Only the calendar changed.

This is a computation, not a choice of method

It is worth being blunt about this, because a great deal of crypto tax writing implies otherwise. The UK computation uses pooling; specific-identification methods do not enter it. There is no election to make, no method to select in your software's settings that changes what you owe, and no arrangement under which a UK individual picks the lots that left.

A tax software setting that offers a choice of method decides which country's answer the tool produces, not which treatment you are entitled to. That is a difference between correct and incorrect output. Which jurisdictions genuinely work which way is the subject of the cost basis methods guide.

One pool for each type of token, not one pool for the portfolio

HMRC is explicit that each type of token needs its own pool with its own pooled allowable cost. Your ETH pool and your BTC pool are separate assets for Capital Gains Tax purposes and never mix. A disposal of ETH is matched against ETH acquisitions and against the ETH pool, and what your BTC did that year is irrelevant to it.

The pool is not tied to a wallet or an exchange either. If you hold the same token in three places, those holdings form one pool for that token, because pooling follows the asset rather than the venue. This is the single most common structural error in a reconstructed history: three exchange exports treated as three separate stories, when the tax computation wants them merged into one running pool per token.

Non-fungible tokens sit outside all of it

HMRC's position on NFTs is short and it is a complete exclusion rather than a variation. Non-fungible tokens are separately identifiable, so they are not pooled, and no matching rules are applied to them. There is no NFT pool, no same day stage and no thirty day stage; each token is its own asset with its own acquisition cost, which is how a unique thing is treated everywhere else in Capital Gains Tax.

That makes NFTs simpler to compute and harder to record, because the burden shifts entirely onto identifying which specific token was disposed of and what it individually cost. Nothing in this page's pooling arithmetic applies to them.

Stage One: The Same Day Rule

Where tokens of the same type are acquired and disposed of on the same day, in the same capacity, HMRC treats all of that day's acquisitions as a single transaction and all of that day's disposals as a single transaction, and matches the two against each other as far as they go. Tokens matched this way do not go into the section 104 pool at all.

Two consequences follow, and both surprise people. The first is that there is no ordering within the day. Because the whole day collapses into one acquisition and one disposal, it makes no difference whether you bought at nine in the morning and sold at four in the afternoon or the other way round. Intraday sequence is invisible to this rule.

The second is that the day's average is what counts. If you made three purchases on the day you sold, at different prices, the rule matches against their combined cost, not against whichever one you would prefer. An active day of trading therefore produces a much simpler computation than the number of transactions suggests, because the stage compresses all of it into one pair of figures.

When the day does not balance

Days rarely balance exactly. If you sold more than you bought that day, the excess disposal falls through to the next stage. If you bought more than you sold, the excess acquisition is available to the thirty day stage for a later disposal, and failing that it joins the pool.

Stage Two: The 30 Day Rule

If you dispose of tokens and then acquire tokens of the same type, in the same capacity, within the next thirty days, the acquired tokens do not go into the pool. They are matched against the earlier disposal instead. Any excess beyond what the disposal needs does go into the pool.

Three details in that sentence do a lot of work, and each is a place where descriptions of this rule commonly go wrong.

The window runs after the disposal, not around it

The rule looks forward. It catches acquisitions in the thirty days following a disposal and says nothing about the thirty days before it — a purchase made a week before you sold is an ordinary acquisition that joined the pool in the ordinary way. If you have read that the window is "thirty days either side", that description belongs to a different regime, not to this one.

Matching runs from the earliest disposal first

Where a single later purchase could be matched against more than one earlier disposal, HMRC matches on the basis of earliest disposal first. The oldest unmatched disposal in the window has first claim on the repurchase. This is the opposite of the intuition most people bring to it, which reaches for the most recent event, and it changes the answer whenever a run of disposals is followed by one repurchase.

What the rule is there to stop

The thirty day rule exists to prevent a holding being sold and immediately repurchased purely to realise a loss or to use an allowance, while leaving the holder in the same economic position as before. The phrase most often attached to it — bed and breakfasting — belongs to HMRC's shares guidance rather than to its crypto guidance, and the vocabulary section below says where it actually comes from.

The practical effect is that a sale followed by a quick repurchase is computed against the repurchase price rather than against the pool. That usually shrinks the gain or the loss to something close to the price movement between the two trades, which is a fair description of what actually happened.

Stage Three: The Section 104 Pool

Everything not taken by the first two stages meets the pool. HMRC describes fungible tokens as pooled so that the owner has a single pooled asset that grows and shrinks with each acquisition, part disposal and disposal. The running figure attached to it is the pooled allowable cost — HMRC's own term, and a more accurate one than "cost basis" for what it actually is, because it is a single cost belonging to a single merged asset rather than a per-unit attribute.

How the pool moves

An acquisition adds its quantity and its cost to the pool. A disposal removes a proportion of the pool: if you dispose of a quarter of the units, a quarter of the pooled allowable cost goes with them, and that is the cost relieved against the proceeds. The average per unit does not change when you dispose — only when you acquire at a price different from the current average.

That is worth sitting with, because it is the mechanical reason a pool behaves differently from a stack of lots. There is no cheap lot to spend and no expensive lot to save. Every disposal takes the same average, so the sequence of your sales does not change your cost the way it would under a lot-based method.

A note on vocabulary

Across this site we use "cost basis" as the general, cross-jurisdiction term for the cost you relieve against proceeds, because it is the term a reader comparing countries will recognise. In UK sections, including this page, we use HMRC's term: pooled allowable cost. They refer to the same quantity here. Where this page quotes or paraphrases HMRC, it uses HMRC's word.

When Tokens Actually Leave the Pool

Everything above assumes you know which movements are disposals. For the pool that is the only question that matters, because a movement that is not a disposal does not touch the pool at all — the tokens are still yours, still pooled, still carrying the same pooled allowable cost.

The test is beneficial ownership

HMRC states at CRYPTO22100 that there is no disposal if the individual retains beneficial ownership throughout the transaction, giving as its example moving tokens between public addresses that the individual beneficially controls — what most people call moving tokens between wallets.

Read that carefully, because the shorthand version of it is wrong. The operative test is retained beneficial ownership, not the word "wallet". A transfer into an address you do not beneficially control is not saved by being called a wallet transfer, and this is the single most common place where a self-custody move and a deposit to somebody else's platform get recorded as the same kind of event when they are not.

It is a documentary test, not a technical one

HMRC's elaboration at CRYPTO61620 is worth quoting in substance because it points somewhere counter-intuitive. Where the recipient of tokens has the ability to deal with them as they want, that is a strong indicator beneficial ownership has passed; where the recipient is specifically restricted from dealing with them, that is a strong indicator it has not. HMRC says the question "will require an examination of the contract/terms and conditions".

So the answer does not live on the blockchain. It is not settled by whether the tokens moved address, whether a smart contract took custody of them, or what a block explorer shows. It is settled by what the agreement permits the other party to do with them — which means the evidence for your own tax position is a terms-of-service document, not a transaction hash.

Staking, lending and collateral

The same test governs the arrangements people most often assume are neutral. HMRC states at CRYPTO61620 that where making a DeFi loan or staking results in the lender or liquidity provider transferring beneficial ownership to the borrower or the platform, that gives rise to a disposal of the loaned or staked tokens, at the time ownership passes.

That is a conditional, not a blanket rule, and the condition does real work: CRYPTO61640 shows HMRC accepting that in some arrangements beneficial ownership does not pass, and sets out both outcomes for posted collateral. Where collateral is not disposed of, section 26 treats the platform as a nominee, so a gain or loss on liquidation is deemed to be the borrower's. Neither "staking is always a disposal" nor "posting collateral is never a disposal" survives contact with what HMRC actually publishes.

The custodial deposit question, which is not settled where people think

HMRC does say at CRYPTO22150 that depositing or withdrawing a non-sterling fiat currency with an exchange produces no acquisition or disposal, because the depositor retains beneficial ownership of it.

It is tempting to read that across to tokens. Do not. HMRC makes no equivalent statement about depositing tokens with a custodial exchange, and that question falls back to the beneficial-ownership test like everything else — which is to say, back to the terms under which the exchange holds them. Given how much of a typical history sits on custodial venues, this is a larger open edge than its coverage suggests, and it is a reason to keep the terms you agreed to alongside the trades you made.

The wider catalogue of what does and does not count as a disposal — swaps, bridges, wrapping, liquidity positions — is the subject of our taxable events guide. Each disposal it identifies is a quantity leaving this pool, taking its share of the pooled allowable cost with it.

What Goes Into the Pool, and What Starts a New One

A pool is only as good as what you put in it. Two questions decide that: which costs may be added alongside the purchase price, and what happens when tokens arrive without being bought.

Costs you may add

HMRC treats network transaction fees as an allowable cost, listing at CRYPTO22150 "transaction fees paid for having the transaction included on the distributed ledger" among the deductible items under section 38 of the Taxation of Chargeable Gains Act 1992. Note HMRC's phrasing: the words "gas" and "gas fee" appear nowhere in the Cryptoassets Manual, so if you are searching for HMRC's position, that is not the phrase to search for.

There is a complication when the fee is paid in tokens rather than in sterling. HMRC states at CRYPTO22280 that such a fee is both a cost of the main disposal and a disposal in its own right, with the tokens handed over as the fee treated as disposed of at market value. A single swap can therefore produce two disposals: the one you intended, and the small one you paid to make it happen.

Where a fee relates to a token-for-token swap — touching both the asset leaving and the asset arriving — HMRC accepts at CRYPTO22150 that splitting it equally between the two is just and reasonable. That is permissive rather than prescriptive: HMRC's wording is that you can take that approach, and the same page allows a different treatment to be considered case by case.

One thing that is not an allowable cost: fees on depositing or withdrawing sterling. HMRC's reasoning at CRYPTO22150 is structural rather than arbitrary — sterling is not an asset for Capital Gains Tax purposes, so there is no acquisition for the fee to attach to.

Tokens that arrive without being bought

Not every acquisition is a purchase, and where the tokens came from decides whether they join an existing pool, start a new one, or take cost away from a pool you already have.

• Airdrops. HMRC states at CRYPTO22350 that the value of an airdropped token does not derive from tokens you already hold, so section 43 does not apply and nothing is taken from your existing pool. The airdropped tokens go into their own section 104 pool — unless you already hold that cryptoasset, in which case they join the pool you have. Whether the receipt itself is taxable as income is a separate question with a split answer at CRYPTO21250, turning on whether anything was done in return.
• Hard forks. The opposite treatment, and for a reason worth understanding. At CRYPTO22300 HMRC says the new tokens' value does derive from the original ones, so section 43 applies: the new tokens get their own pool, and the allowable costs of the original pool are split between the two on a just and reasonable basis. HMRC does not prescribe a method for that split, while reserving the right to enquire into one it considers unreasonable.
• Gifts out. Giving tokens away is a disposal under CRYPTO22100, with one exception: a gift to a spouse or civil partner. Donating to charity does not attract Capital Gains Tax either, subject to two carve-outs HMRC states on the same page — a tainted donation, or a disposal to the charity for more than acquisition cost.

The pattern across those three is consistent even though the answers differ. HMRC is asking, in each case, whether the new tokens' value came out of something you already owned. If it did, cost moves with it. If it did not, the new holding starts clean and your existing pool is untouched.

Why this matters before you compute anything

Each of these rules is a place where a reconstructed history quietly goes wrong. Fees omitted from the pool overstate every subsequent gain. A fee paid in tokens recorded only as a cost misses a disposal. A fork recorded as a free acquisition leaves the original pool carrying cost that should have moved. None of these errors announces itself, and all of them compound, because the pool carries the mistake forward into every disposal that follows it.

A Worked Holding, All Three Stages

HMRC publishes seven worked pooling examples of its own, and they are worth reading directly: CRYPTO22253 covers the 30 day rule, CRYPTO22254 the same day rule interacting with the pool, CRYPTO22255 the 30 day rule interacting with the pool, and CRYPTO22257 a crypto-to-crypto exchange. The example below runs one holding through the whole sequence in sterling, and continues past where HMRC's stop.

The prices below are illustrative. They were chosen for this example and are not historical quotes for any date named. What is being demonstrated is the mechanism, which behaves the same way whatever the prices are.

The holding

Neither purchase is on the same day as a disposal and neither falls inside a thirty day window, so both simply join the pool. The pool now holds 5.0 ETH with a pooled allowable cost of £10,350.00, an average of £2,070.00 per ETH. That average is the only cost figure the pool knows; the £1,850 and the £2,400 have merged and cannot be recovered separately.

The disposal

On 20 February 2026 the holder disposes of 2.0 ETH for £6,200.00, which is £3,100.00 per ETH. What that disposal costs depends entirely on what happens next — and specifically on whether anything is bought back within thirty days.

Case A: a repurchase seventeen days later

On 8 March 2026 the holder buys 1.0 ETH for £2,900.00. That is seventeen days after the disposal, so the 30 day rule takes it. The purchase does not join the pool. It is matched against the earlier disposal, and the disposal splits in two.

Note what happened to the pool. One ETH came out of it, taking £2,070.00 of pooled allowable cost with it, leaving 4.0 ETH at £8,280.00 — still an average of £2,070.00, because a disposal does not move the average. The 8 March purchase never entered the pool at all, so its £2,900.00 is nowhere in that figure.

Case B: the same repurchase, thirty-three days later

Change one thing. The holder buys the same 1.0 ETH for the same £2,900.00, but on 25 March 2026 instead — thirty-three days after the disposal, outside the window. Now the 30 day rule does not apply, the whole disposal meets the pool, and the purchase joins the pool afterwards in the ordinary way.

The pool then takes the repurchase: 3.0 ETH at £6,210.00 becomes 4.0 ETH at £9,110.00, and because £2,900.00 is above the old average, the average rises to £2,277.50 per ETH.

Case C: all three stages on one disposal

The first two cases never reach stage one, because nothing was bought on the day of the disposal. Add one trade and the cascade shows its full shape. Keep everything from Case A, and suppose that on 20 February 2026 — the day of the disposal — the holder also buys 0.5 ETH at £3,050.00.

Now the 2.0 ETH disposal is split three ways, in order, each stage taking what it can and passing the rest down:

• 1. Same day rule takes 0.5 ETH, matched against that day's purchase at £3,050.00 — proceeds £1,550.00 against cost £1,525.00, a gain of £25.00.
• 2. 30 day rule takes 1.0 ETH, matched against the 8 March repurchase at £2,900.00 — proceeds £3,100.00 against cost £2,900.00, a gain of £200.00.
• 3. Section 104 pool takes the remaining 0.5 ETH at the pooled average of £2,070.00 — proceeds £1,550.00 against cost £1,035.00, a gain of £515.00.

Total gain: £740.00, from £6,200.00 of proceeds against £5,460.00 of cost relieved. Only the 0.5 ETH taken by stage three came out of the pool, so the pool is left holding 4.5 ETH at £9,315.00 — still averaging £2,070.00, because neither of the matched purchases ever entered it.

One disposal, one price, three answers depending on what else the holder did around it: £740.00 in Case C, £1,230.00 in Case A, £2,060.00 in Case B. That is the whole argument for learning the order rather than a method name.

What the cases show

The reported gain is £1,230.00 in Case A and £2,060.00 in Case B — a difference of £830.00 on identical trades at identical prices, separated only by sixteen days on the calendar.

But look at what each case is left holding. Case A carries 4.0 ETH at £8,280.00 of pooled allowable cost; Case B carries 4.0 ETH at £9,110.00. That gap is £830.00 — the same number, on the other side of the ledger. The case that reported the smaller gain is holding the smaller cost, which means a larger gain on whatever it sells next.

This is the single most useful thing to understand about the matching rules, and it generalises well beyond them: the stages move a gain between tax years, they do not remove it. Our method comparison shows the same identity holding across four different methods on one fixed ledger, which is the clearest way to see that the arithmetic is structural rather than a quirk of the UK rules.

When the Allowance Is Already Spent

Here is where HMRC's examples stop and a real holder's problem starts. Suppose the Case A gain of £1,230.00 arises in a tax year where the annual exempt amount has already been used up by earlier disposals, and the holder's income puts the gain above the basic rate band. Every pound of that gain is then chargeable.

What follows is arithmetic, not an HMRC rule. There is no provision requiring or describing the sale of cryptoassets to fund a tax bill, and the words "forced", "liquidate" and "sell to pay" appear nowhere across the Capital Gains Tax pages of HMRC's Cryptoassets Manual. The effect described here falls out of the charging rules; it is not a rule of its own, and nobody should represent it as one.

The bill

At the 24% rate that applies for the 2026 to 2027 tax year to gains falling above the basic rate band, a chargeable gain of £1,230.00 produces £295.20 of Capital Gains Tax.

Paying it from the asset

If the holder has £295.20 in a bank account, the story ends. If the only place the money can come from is the ETH itself, it does not — because selling ETH to raise the cash is another disposal, and that disposal has its own gain.

The pool after Case A stands at £2,070.00 per ETH against a market price of £3,100.00. So each pound of proceeds from a funding sale is 33.23% gain, and each pound raised carries roughly 7.97 pence of its own tax. Raising exactly £295.20 therefore leaves the holder short.

The figures close on themselves, which is the check worth making: the £25.58 of overshoot is exactly the tax the funding sale creates, and £320.78 of proceeds less £25.58 of new tax leaves precisely the £295.20 the original bill needed.

Why the overshoot is not a fixed percentage

The 8.67% here is specific to this pool and this price. The overshoot is driven by how much of each pound of proceeds is gain, which is a function of the gap between the pooled allowable cost and the current price. A holder whose pooled cost sits close to the market price sells barely more than the bill; a holder sitting on a very low pooled cost — an early acquirer, typically — can find the overshoot substantially larger.

The practical reading is that a bill funded out of the asset is always larger than the bill, and that the size of the gap is knowable in advance from the pool rather than discovered in January.

The 2026 to 2027 Figures

This is the only page in this cluster that states a UK rate. Every other page links here rather than repeating one, so that when a figure moves there is a single sentence to correct rather than seven.

The annual exempt amount

For the 2026 to 2027 tax year, which runs from 6 April 2026 to 5 April 2027, the Capital Gains Tax annual exempt amount for individuals is £3,000. That is the same figure that applied for 2025 to 2026 and for 2024 to 2025. It fell to £3,000 with effect from 6 April 2024, having been £6,000 for 2023 to 2024 and £12,300 for 2022 to 2023.

The history is worth carrying because it changes what old advice is worth. Guidance written against a £12,300 allowance was describing a world in which a moderate portfolio could be rebalanced without a reporting obligation arising at all. At £3,000 that is no longer true for many holders, and an article that has not been re-dated since 2022 may be giving advice that was correct when written and is not correct now.

HMRC's own term is the annual exempt amount. "Tax-free allowance" is gov.uk's plain-English gloss for the same thing, not a separate relief, and the two should not be added together.

The rates

For the 2026 to 2027 tax year, Capital Gains Tax on an individual's cryptoasset gains is charged at 18% where the gain — added to taxable income, after deducting the annual exempt amount — falls within the basic rate Income Tax band, and at 24% on the part above it. gov.uk lists the pair as "18% and 24% for individuals" under its heading for 6 April 2026 onwards.

These are not new rates. The 18% and 24% pair took effect for non-residential-property gains made on or after 30 October 2024 and has continued since; what changes annually is the banding it is measured against, not the percentages themselves.

The band the rate is tested against

For 2026 to 2027 the standard Personal Allowance is £12,570 and the basic rate Income Tax band runs from £12,571 to £50,270. gov.uk's own Capital Gains Tax worked examples use £37,700 — the width of that band — as the headroom against which a gain is tested to decide how much of it is charged at 18% and how much at 24%.

The practical consequence is that a crypto gain does not have a single rate. It has a rate that depends on your income, and the same gain can be charged partly at 18% and partly at 24% if it straddles the top of the band. Anyone quoting "the crypto tax rate is 24%" is quoting the higher half of a two-part answer.

Why every figure above carries its tax year

Each of these numbers is stated with the tax year it belongs to because each is capable of moving, and because a figure extracted from this page without its year would be indistinguishable from one that is still current. The Autumn Budget on 28 October 2026 can change any of them. The figures above are correct as at 21 September 2026; after the Budget, check gov.uk's Capital Gains Tax rates and allowances guidance rather than trusting this paragraph, and note that a change announced at a Budget usually carries its own effective date, which may not be the date of the announcement.

SA108 and the Deadlines That Apply to It

Capital gains are reported on SA108, the Capital gains summary, filed alongside the main SA100 Self Assessment return. Since the 2024 to 2025 return, SA108 has carried a dedicated Cryptoassets section.

When you have to fill it in

HMRC's SA108 Notes for the tax year 6 April 2025 to 5 April 2026 say to complete the pages if any of the following applies:

• You sold or disposed of chargeable assets worth more than £50,000;
• Your chargeable gains before taking off any losses were more than £3,000, the annual exempt amount;
• You want to claim an allowable capital loss, or make any other capital gains claim or election for the year;
• You have gains from an earlier year that are taxable in that period.

The first of those catches people who assume they are outside the system. It is a test on disposal proceeds, not on gain. A holder who churns a portfolio actively and ends the year down can still be well over £50,000 of disposals and inside the filing requirement, having made no profit at all. For tax years before 2023 to 2024 the test was four times the annual exempt amount; the flat £50,000 applies from 2023 to 2024 onwards.

The cryptoasset boxes

On the SA108 for 6 April 2025 to 5 April 2026, cryptoassets have their own section at boxes 13.1 to 13.8: the number of disposals, disposal proceeds, allowable costs, gains in the year, losses in the year, any claim or election code, and gains already reported with tax already paid through the real time Capital Gains Tax service.

This is not the "Other property, assets and gains" section. Those are boxes 14 to 22, and putting crypto disposals there misfiles them. The distinction only exists on returns for 2024 to 2025 onwards — on an earlier return there was no cryptoasset section to use.

The deadlines, by tax year

Deadlines are stated below for the 2025 to 2026 tax year, which ended on 5 April 2026. The dates recur annually against the tax year that ended the preceding 5 April, so the pattern holds even after these particular dates pass.

Two of those are commonly misread. 31 October binds paper returns only — a reader filing online has until 31 January and nothing happens to them on 31 October. And 31 January is two obligations that share a date, not one: filing the return and paying the tax. Meeting one does not discharge the other.

The 30 December date is conditional rather than general. It only matters if you want the amount owed coded out through PAYE, and it is not an alternative filing deadline for anyone else. Separately, those who make payments on account have a second payment date of 31 July.

If you register late

Registering after the 5 October date does not simply make you late. For registrations after 5 October 2026, gov.uk states that HMRC will send a letter or email carrying a different filing deadline — three months from the date on that letter or email.

What does not move is the money. Tax owed for the 2025 to 2026 tax year is still due by 11:59pm on 31 January 2027. The extension is to the filing date only, it is triggered by HMRC's correspondence rather than granted automatically, and reading it as extra time to pay is an expensive mistake.

What Your Exchange Will Start Reporting About You

The Cryptoasset Reporting Framework changes the information position between a UK holder and HMRC. It does not create a new tax and it does not create a new filing obligation for individuals. What it does is oblige providers to collect and report user data, which means the computation described on this page will increasingly be one HMRC can check against a second source.

The registration and reporting duties fall on providers, not on users. A UK crypto holder does not register for anything under this framework and files nothing under it, and any guidance telling individuals to "register for CARF" has misread whose obligation it is.

What reaches you is narrower. Your provider will ask you for a self-certification, and it must notify you that your details are being reported to HMRC. The registration dates that circulate are deadlines for providers rather than for you, and the primary sources give two different ones. The instrument behind the framework, both of those dates, the penalty that attaches to a missing self-certification and the notification duty are set out with their regulation numbers in the records guide linked below.

If a provider is reporting your disposals, the pooled computation you file needs to be one you can reproduce — a records problem before it is a tax problem, and the subject of our records and reconstruction guide.

Looking This Up Yourself, and the Words That Break the Search

Everything on this page comes from guidance you can read directly. The obstacle is vocabulary, not access: several terms in general circulation are not HMRC's, and searching the manual for them returns nothing useful.

What HMRC actually calls the three stages

On CRYPTO22200, HMRC's own headings are "Same day rule", "the 30 day rule" and "section 104 pool". Note the spelling: HMRC writes "same day" and "30 day" without hyphens throughout that page. Most writing on the subject, including plenty of reputable writing, hyphenates them. That does not make the hyphenated form wrong in ordinary prose, but it does mean a literal search can miss the source you are trying to reach.

"Matching rules" is not HMRC's name for this

This one is worth stating plainly, because the phrase is widely used as though it were official. Across the whole Cryptoassets Manual, "matching rules" appears exactly once, and it appears negatively — in the sentence explaining that non-fungible tokens are separately identifiable, are not pooled, and have no matching rules applied to them. HMRC does not use it as a collective label for the same day, 30 day and pooling machinery.

Where HMRC does have a generic name for this family of rules, it is in the Capital Gains Manual, which calls them the share identification rules — because the crypto treatment is an application of a regime originally written for shares. If you want the underlying rules rather than their crypto-specific statement, that is the phrase that finds them.

"Bed and breakfasting" belongs to the shares guidance

The phrase does not appear anywhere in HMRC's Cryptoassets Manual. It appears in the Capital Gains Manual at CG51560, describing what the equivalent rule for shares was introduced in 1998 to counter, and CRYPTO22200 simply cross-refers there for further guidance.

So the phrase is real, it is HMRC's, and it is about shares. Attaching it to "HMRC's crypto rules" — as a great deal of secondary writing does, and as some of our own older material has done — attributes to the crypto guidance a term the crypto guidance never uses. The rule it describes is the same rule; the label has been carried across.

A trap in citing these pages

If you quote a manual section, be careful with dates. The "Published" and "Updated" stamps on a gov.uk manual page belong to the whole manual, not the section you are reading, and a section's own change log can sit years from both: CRYPTO22200 alone has three defensible-looking candidates for "last updated". The safe form is the one used in this page's sources — cite the section identifier and the date you read it, and claim no update date at all.

Proposed, and Not in Force

One measure on the horizon would change how some of this works, and it is worth knowing about precisely so that you do not apply it yet.

On 13 July 2026 HMRC published draft material titled "Cryptoasset loans and liquidity pools". It would defer Capital Gains Tax, in defined circumstances, until an economic disposal of the cryptoasset — covering single-asset lending, borrowing, and automated market making arrangements. Under the treatment in force today, moving tokens into some of those arrangements can itself be a disposal, which is why the proposal exists.

It is proposed; if enacted, it applies to transactions occurring on or after 6 April 2027. That commencement date is stated in three documents published the same day — the tax information and impact note, the explanatory note and the draft legislation itself — so it is not an inference. What it is not is law: a draft measure becomes law when a Finance Act carries it, and until that happens the current treatment is the one that applies to a transaction you make today.

Two cautions. A stated commencement is not enactment, so "the rules change on 6 April 2027" runs ahead of the facts; and the measure already has its own start date, so tying it to the October Budget is an assumption rather than a reading. Where these arrangements are disposals under current law, that treatment is explained on our taxable events guide.

What the 28 October Budget Can Move

The UK Autumn Budget is confirmed for Wednesday 28 October 2026. HM Treasury announced the date on 31 July 2026, both in the Chancellor's letter to the Treasury Committee and in a press release published the same day.

Three things on this page are capable of changing at a Budget: the annual exempt amount, the Capital Gains Tax rates, and the income band the rate is tested against. The matching rules themselves — same day, 30 day, section 104 — sit in longstanding legislation and are a much less likely target, though nothing is impossible.

A dated figure does not silently become wrong after a Budget — it becomes incomplete, because a later position now exists that it does not mention. The worked examples stay arithmetically valid whatever the rate is; only the final tax line in the allowance section depends on the 24% figure.

This page has a booked update for 29 October 2026. We are saying so because a reader landing here on 30 October deserves to know whether the absence of Budget news means nothing changed or means nobody has looked yet. If a figure moved, the update will carry the new figure with the date it takes effect — which, for a Budget change, is frequently not the date of the announcement.

Conclusion

The UK does not ask you which coins you sold. It computes an answer, in a fixed order, and the order is the part worth learning: same day first, then the thirty days after, then the pool. Once you can see which stage a disposal falls into, the arithmetic behind it is a few lines long.

The worked holding above shows what that order is worth in money. The same trades at the same prices produced a £1,230.00 gain or a £2,060.00 gain depending on sixteen days of calendar, and the £830.00 difference did not disappear — it reappeared as pooled allowable cost carried into the next disposal. Nothing in these rules removes a gain. They decide which year it lands in.

The part most guidance leaves out is what happens after the computation. A bill funded from the asset costs more than the bill, because the sale that raises the cash is itself a disposal with its own gain. In the example here that overshoot was 8.67%, and the figure is knowable in advance from the pool rather than discovered in January.

Two habits follow from all of this. Keep one running pool per token across every venue you use, because that is the unit the computation works in and three separate exchange histories will not add up to it. And date every figure you rely on — including the ones on this page, which carry the 2026 to 2027 tax year for exactly that reason, and which have a Budget between them and the filing deadline.

One last framing, because it decides where effort is worth spending. The arithmetic above is the easy half — it runs on a sheet of paper. The hard half is the record it runs on: one pool per token, across every venue, with each acquisition's cost attached in sterling at the time. Get that wrong and no amount of understanding the stages produces a figure you can stand behind.

Sources

HMRC manual sections are cited by section identifier and the date they were read. The "Published" and "Updated" stamps shown on a gov.uk manual page apply to the whole manual rather than to the individual section, so no last-updated date is claimed here for any of them.

• HMRC Cryptoassets Manual, CRYPTO22200 — pooling, the same day rule and the 30 day rule, and the exclusion of non-fungible tokens. Read 21 September 2026. gov.uk
• HMRC Cryptoassets Manual, CRYPTO22250 — the seven worked pooling examples, including CRYPTO22253, CRYPTO22254, CRYPTO22255 and CRYPTO22257. Read 21 September 2026. gov.uk
• HMRC Capital Gains Manual, CG51560 — the share identification rules, and the origin of the bed and breakfasting description. Read 21 September 2026. gov.uk
• Capital Gains Tax rates and allowances — the 2026 to 2027 figures. Read 21 September 2026. gov.uk
• Self Assessment tax returns: deadlines. Read 21 September 2026. gov.uk
• Self Assessment: Capital gains summary (SA108) and its Notes for 6 April 2025 to 5 April 2026. Read 21 September 2026. gov.uk
• Check if you'll need to report cryptoasset data to HMRC — the provider-side guidance. Read 21 September 2026. gov.uk
• The Cryptoasset Service Providers (Due Diligence and Reporting Requirements) Regulations 2025, SI 2025/744 — regulations 8, 10 and 13. Read 21 September 2026. legislation.gov.uk
• Spending crypto on a card is a disposal like any other, so every stage above runs behind an ordinary purchase. What that costs, and which part of it no fee table shows, is worked through in our guide to what a crypto card costs.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I choose first in first out for my UK crypto tax?

No. In the UK the computation is prescribed rather than elected: a disposal is matched against same-day acquisitions, then against acquisitions in the following thirty days, and the remainder against the section 104 pool. The UK computation uses pooling; specific-identification methods do not enter it. If your tax software offers a choice of method, that setting decides which country's answer it produces, not which treatment you are entitled to — set it to the UK rules, or the output will not be the figure you owe.

Does the 30 day rule apply if I buy before I sell?

No. The UK 30 day rule looks forward only: it catches acquisitions of the same token made in the thirty days after a disposal. A purchase made shortly before you sold is an ordinary acquisition that entered the section 104 pool in the ordinary way, and the disposal is matched against the pool for that quantity. Descriptions of a window running "thirty days either side" of a disposal do not describe this rule.

Do I need a separate pool for each exchange I use?

No — and treating your exchanges separately is the most common structural error in a reconstructed history. Pooling follows the asset, not the venue, so the same token held across three exchanges and a hardware wallet forms one section 104 pool with one pooled allowable cost. What you do need is a separate pool for each type of token: your ETH pool and your BTC pool never mix.

Do I have to file if I did not make a profit?

Possibly, yes. HMRC's SA108 Notes for the 2025 to 2026 tax year set a test on disposal proceeds that is independent of whether you gained anything: the pages must be completed if you disposed of chargeable assets worth more than £50,000, whatever the outcome. An active year of trading that finishes flat or down can still cross that line. The pages are also required if gains before losses exceeded the £3,000 annual exempt amount, or if you want to claim an allowable loss.

What is the difference between the 31 October and 31 January deadlines?

For the 2025 to 2026 UK tax year, 31 October 2026 is the deadline for a paper Self Assessment return to reach HMRC, and it binds nobody filing online. 31 January 2027 is two separate obligations that share one date: filing the online return, and paying the tax owed for that year. Meeting one does not discharge the other, and registering late extends the filing date only — the payment date does not move.

Do I need to register for the Cryptoasset Reporting Framework?

No. Under the UK framework the registration and reporting duties fall on cryptoasset service providers, not on individual holders; a UK user registers for nothing and files nothing under it. Your own obligation is narrower: give your provider a valid self-certification when it asks, covering name, date of birth, home address, country of residence and, for UK residents, your National Insurance number or Unique Taxpayer Reference. Failing to do so can attract a penalty not exceeding £300 where the failure is deliberate or careless.

How much crypto do I have to sell to pay a Capital Gains Tax bill?

More than the bill, because the sale that raises the cash is itself a disposal with its own gain. How much more depends on the gap between your pooled allowable cost and the current price. In the worked example on this page — a pooled cost of £2,070.00 per ETH against a £3,100.00 price, at the 24% rate for the 2026 to 2027 tax year — clearing a £295.20 bill required disposing of £320.78, an overshoot of 8.67%. A holder with a very low pooled cost will need to sell proportionally more.

Financial Disclaimer

This content is not financial advice. All information provided is for educational purposes only. Cryptocurrency investments carry significant investment risk, and past performance does not guarantee future results. Always do your own research and consult a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions.