Capital Gains Tax in Ireland: What You Pay, When You Pay It, and When You File
Capital Gains Tax is the simplest major Irish tax to calculate and the easiest one to get in trouble with. The rate is a flat 33%. There's one annual exemption. That's the whole rate structure.
The trouble comes from everything around it: paying and filing are two separate obligations on two different calendars, you have to file even in years when you owe nothing, and the order in which you sell things changes what you owe.
In the example below, selling a losing holding in the same year as a winning one saves €1,155 in tax. Sell them a month apart, either side of 31 December, and you don't get that.
What CGT applies to
CGT is charged on the gain — what you sold something for, minus what you paid for it — not on the sale price.
It applies to disposals of:
- Shares, including RSUs and options once they've vested and become yours
- Crypto-assets, on every disposal including crypto-to-crypto swaps
- Property other than your main home
- Land, business assets, and most other capital assets
- Gifts of assets to anyone other than your spouse or civil partner
Your main home is generally exempt under principal private residence relief, though periods when it wasn't your main home, or when part of it was let or used for business, can restrict that. If you've rented out a property you previously lived in, don't assume the exemption still covers the whole gain.
A "disposal" is broader than a sale. Swapping one asset for another is a disposal. Gifting is a disposal. You can trigger CGT without receiving any cash at all — which matters, because the tax is payable in euro regardless.
The €1,270 exemption, and how netting works
Every individual gets a personal exemption of €1,270 a year of net gains, tax-free.
Three rules attach to it:
- It doesn't carry forward. Unused, it's gone at the end of the year.
- It's not transferable between spouses. A couple gets €1,270 each, not €2,540 against one person's gains.
- It applies to your net position — gains and losses across the year are set against each other first, and the exemption comes off what's left.
That last rule is the one worth planning around.
Say in the same tax year you sell one holding at a €9,000 gain and another at a €3,500 loss.
| Calculation | Amount | |
|---|---|---|
| Gain on the first disposal | €9,000.00 | |
| Loss on the second disposal | −€3,500.00 | |
| Net gain | €5,500.00 | |
| Less annual exemption | −€1,270.00 | |
| Taxable gain | €4,230.00 | |
| CGT at 33% | €4,230 × 33% | €1,395.90 |
Now the same person sells only the winning holding, and keeps the losing one until January:
| Calculation | Amount | |
|---|---|---|
| Gain | €9,000.00 | |
| Less annual exemption | −€1,270.00 | |
| Taxable gain | €7,730.00 | |
| CGT at 33% | €7,730 × 33% | €2,550.90 |
Difference: €1,155 — which is exactly €3,500 × 33%. Crystallising the loss in the same year as the gain converts it into cash. Deferring it to January means waiting until you have a future gain to use it against.
The loss isn't lost either way: unused losses carry forward indefinitely. But they only carry forward if you declared them, which brings us to the part people skip.
Paying and filing are not the same thing
This is where the surcharges come from, and it catches organised, well-paid people every year.
Paying:
| Disposals made | Tax payable by |
|---|---|
| 1 January – 30 November | 15 December of the same year |
| 1 – 31 December | 31 January of the following year |
Filing: separately, a CGT return is due by 31 October of the following year — on a Form CG1 if you're a PAYE employee, or within your Form 11 if you're self-assessed.
So a disposal in June 2026 means: pay by 15 December 2026, file by 31 October 2027. Fourteen months apart. Paying on time and never filing is one of the most common failures we see.
You must file even when no tax is due. That includes years where the €1,270 exemption covered your entire gain, and years where you made a loss. Late filing carries a surcharge of 5% of the tax due if you're up to two months late, and 10% beyond that.
And the December quirk is genuinely counter-intuitive: a disposal on 30 November is payable within about two weeks; a disposal on 1 December gets fourteen months. Same tax year, different deadline.
Which shares did you actually sell?
If you bought the same asset in several tranches — almost everyone with an RSU plan or a regular investment — you need a rule to decide which units you disposed of.
Ireland uses FIFO: first in, first out. The units treated as sold are the oldest you hold, regardless of which ones you intended to sell or which your broker reports.
There's one exception. The four-week rule: assets bought and sold within four weeks are matched specifically against that acquisition rather than on a FIFO basis. And where such a disposal produces a loss, that loss can only be set against gains on assets acquired and disposed of within the same four-week window. It exists to stop people manufacturing artificial losses by selling and immediately rebuying.
For RSUs specifically, there's a step before all this: the value at vesting was already taxed as employment income through payroll, and that value becomes your base cost. Only growth after vesting is a capital gain. The full mechanics are in crypto tax in Ireland — the rules are identical for shares.
What Revenue asks you to keep
Records are your responsibility, and the burden falls years after the event:
- Acquisition records — dates, quantities, prices paid, for every tranche. FIFO makes this essential rather than optional.
- Disposal records — dates, quantities, proceeds.
- All fees — broker, trading, legal and professional costs are allowable and reduce your gain.
- Euro values at both dates if the asset was priced in another currency. Irish CGT is computed in euro, so exchange rate movement between acquisition and disposal is itself part of your gain.
- Full transaction exports from any broker or platform, downloaded while you still have the account. Losing access when you change jobs or when a platform closes is the single most common records problem we see.
- Enhancement expenditure on property — capital improvements, not repairs.
If reconstructing several years of this sounds worse than the tax, that's the usual reaction, and it's what our CGT Review service is for.
If you're not Irish-domiciled, or you're leaving
Two situations change the scope of what's caught.
Ordinary residence. After three consecutive years of Irish tax residence you become ordinarily resident from the start of year four. Someone who is resident or ordinarily resident is within the charge to Irish CGT on disposals of assets wherever they are located — including property or investments abroad. That status continues for three years after you stop being resident, so leaving Ireland doesn't end the exposure immediately.
Domicile. If you're resident but not Irish-domiciled, foreign gains are generally taxed on a remittance basis — that is, to the extent you bring them into Ireland. Irish assets are taxable regardless. What counts as a remittance is broader than a bank transfer, and mixing pre-arrival capital with post-arrival gains in one account turns a clean position into an unclear one.
Both are covered in moving to Ireland: how cross-border taxes work.
Questions we get asked
I made a loss this year. Is there anything to do?
File. Declaring the loss is what preserves it for future years — unused losses carry forward indefinitely, but Revenue has no record of a loss you never reported. A bad year is an asset if you file it and nothing at all if you don't.
I sold shares but the gain was under €1,270, so no tax. Do I still file?
Yes. The filing obligation is separate from the payment obligation and applies whenever you've made a disposal, regardless of whether tax is due.
Can my spouse and I combine our exemptions?
No. Each of you has €1,270 against your own gains. Transfers of assets between spouses and civil partners are themselves exempt from CGT, which can matter for how holdings are arranged — but that's planning to do in advance, not after a sale.
I gifted shares to my son. Is there CGT?
Generally yes. A gift is a disposal, and it's treated as taking place at market value even though no money changed hands. Your son may also have a Capital Acquisitions Tax position on receiving it — see inheritance tax in Ireland.
I sold my house. Do I owe CGT?
Usually not, if it was your main home throughout your ownership. It gets more complicated if you let it out, moved abroad and kept it, or used part of it for business. Worth checking rather than assuming, particularly for a large gain.
How far back can Revenue look?
Longer than you'd like, and the obligation to hold records sits with you. Keep acquisition records for as long as you hold the asset, and for six years after you dispose of it.
If you've disposed of anything since 2022 — shares, crypto, a property, even a gift — check whether a CG1 was filed for each of those years. Paying the tax and skipping the return is how a settled liability turns into a surcharge.