Crypto Tax in Ireland: What Every Expat Should Know

The basic rule: crypto gains are CGT

If you buy crypto and later sell it, swap it for another crypto, or use it to buy something at a higher value than you paid, the profit is subject to Capital Gains Tax — a flat 33%. This applies whether you're holding Bitcoin, Ethereum or any other token, regardless of nationality, as long as you're Irish tax resident.

There are no special crypto tax rules in Ireland. Revenue's position is that the existing rules apply, which is why the answer to most crypto questions is "the same as it would be for shares." Its detailed guidance is in the Taxation of crypto-assets manual. That's worth taking literally: the annual exemption, the FIFO matching rule, the payment dates and the filing obligation are the same ones that apply to shares and property, and they're set out in full in capital gains tax in Ireland.

One boundary to hold onto before going further: this section is about gains on assets you bought. Crypto that arrives in your wallet without you buying it is usually a different tax entirely — see two sections down.

What counts as a "disposal"

This is the part that catches people out. A disposal isn't just "cashing out to euro." You trigger a taxable event any time you:

• Sell crypto for fiat currency
• Swap one cryptocurrency for another — yes, even crypto-to-crypto trades
• Swap a token for a stablecoin. Moving into USDT or USDC is a disposal like any other; the fact that the value then sits still doesn't undo it
• Use crypto to pay for goods or services
• Gift crypto to someone else, with exceptions for transfers between spouses and civil partners

So if you swapped Bitcoin for Ethereum last year and never converted anything to euro, you may still owe CGT on that swap if the Bitcoin had risen since you bought it. The tax is due in euro whether or not you hold any.

Which brings up the record-keeping consequence: every transaction has to be valued in euro at the moment it happened, not at the year-end rate and not at the rate when you eventually cash out. A swap executed at 3am in a token pair that never touches euro still needs a euro value attached to both sides.

When it's income, not a capital gain

Not all crypto is a capital gain, and this is the single most common misunderstanding we see.

Crypto you receive rather than buy is generally income, subject to Income Tax, PRSI and USC at your marginal rates — not CGT at 33%. That covers:

• Staking rewards
• Mining proceeds
• Airdrops, depending on the circumstances
• Crypto paid to you as salary or for freelance work

The value that counts is the market value in euro at the moment you received it. And then there's a second step people miss entirely: that same value becomes your base cost for CGT purposes when you later dispose of those tokens. So a staking reward can be taxed twice over its life — once as income when it lands, and again as a capital gain on the growth after that.

Get this wrong in the obvious direction — treating staking rewards as CGT — and you've under-declared income tax while over-declaring capital gains. That's harder to unwind than simply filing correctly the first time. If you're not sure which side of the line your activity falls on, particularly if you're doing anything that looks like trading rather than investing, that's worth resolving properly — the wider position is covered in the complete guide.

The annual exemption

Every individual gets a personal CGT exemption of €1,270 per year. That amount of net gains is tax-free.

Two rules attach to it. It doesn't carry forward if unused — it's genuinely use-it-or-lose-it each year. And it's not transferable between spouses, so a couple gets €1,270 each, not €2,540 pooled against one person's gains.

How the tax is calculated

The headline formula is simple: taxable gain equals proceeds, minus your cost, minus allowable costs like exchange fees, minus your €1,270 exemption. The remainder is taxed at 33%. Where you've made several disposals in a year, gains and losses are netted against each other before the exemption is applied.

The complication is working out your cost when you bought the same token in several tranches — which is almost everyone.

Ireland uses FIFO. First in, first out. The units you're treated as disposing of are the oldest ones you hold, regardless of which ones you think you sold.

There's one exception: the four-week rule. Crypto bought and disposed of within four weeks is matched specifically against that acquisition rather than on a FIFO basis. And if 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. The rule exists to stop people manufacturing artificial losses.

Here's what that looks like in practice.

Because the disposal happened in June, the €9,678.90 is payable by 15 December 2026 — and the return declaring it isn't due until October 2027. Those are two separate obligations, which is where people come unstuck.

Losses matter too

If you sold crypto at a loss, that loss offsets gains elsewhere in the same year, and any unused balance carries forward against future gains indefinitely.

This is one of the most under-used parts of Irish CGT — but there's a condition attached that catches people out. You have to report the loss to preserve it. A loss you never declared in a return isn't sitting on file waiting for you; Revenue has no record of it, and using it years later against a gain means retrospectively filing the year it arose.

So the year you lost money is precisely the year you shouldn't skip the return, even though no tax is due. A bad crypto year is an asset if you file it, and nothing at all if you don't. If you've never filed anything with Revenue before, the general mechanics are in claiming your PAYE tax back for the first time.

When you need to pay

There are two obligations here, on two different calendars, and conflating them is the most expensive mistake in this article.

Paying. CGT runs on a split payment year:

Filing. Separately, you must file a CGT return by 31 October of the following year. For a PAYE employee that's the paper Form CG1; if you're self-assessed it goes in your Form 11.

And note this: you must file even if no tax is due. A year where losses wiped out your gains, or where the €1,270 exemption covered everything, still needs a return. Late filing carries a surcharge — 5% if you're up to two months late, 10% beyond that — calculated on the tax due.

So a disposal in June 2026 means: pay by 15 December 2026, file by 31 October 2027. Paying on time and forgetting to file is a real and common outcome.

If reconstructing several years of this sounds worse than the tax itself, that's the usual reaction — and it's what our CGT Review service is for.

What records to keep

Because every swap and disposal is a separate calculation, the practical challenge isn't the rate. It's reconstructing an accurate history across multiple exchanges and wallets, years after the fact.

Keep:

• Full transaction exports from every exchange you've used, downloaded while you still have the account
• On-chain records for any self-custody wallet — addresses and transaction hashes
• The euro value at the date and time of each transaction
• Every fee — trading, network, withdrawal — since they're allowable costs
• Your acquisition history, which FIFO makes essential rather than optional

The failure mode we see most is an exchange that closed, got acquired, or restricted access in the user's country, taking the transaction history with it. Export now, not when you need it. If you arrived in Ireland holding crypto bought elsewhere, your acquisition records from before you moved matter too — and your residence position determines what's in scope in the first place, which is covered in moving to Ireland: how cross-border taxes work.

Questions we get asked

I bought crypto before I moved to Ireland. Is the whole gain taxable here? Your cost is what you actually paid, whenever you paid it — it isn't rebased to the value on the day you arrived. So a disposal while Irish resident can capture growth from before you got here. Whether the gain is within the Irish net at all depends on your residence and domicile position, which is worth checking before you sell rather than after.

I've only ever swapped between tokens and never withdrawn to euro. Do I really have to declare anything? Yes. Crypto-to-crypto swaps are disposals. The absence of a euro withdrawal doesn't defer anything — it just means the tax is payable in euro you'll have to find elsewhere, which is worth planning for before a big swap rather than after.

My exchange shut down and I can't get my transaction history. What now? You still have to file something, and "the records are gone" isn't a position Revenue treats as an answer. Reconstruct what you can from bank transfers in and out, on-chain data, emails and any exports you took at the time, and be transparent about the basis of the estimate. A documented reasonable reconstruction is a far better place to be than silence.

I lost money overall. Is there anything to do? File. Declaring the loss is what preserves it for future years, and unused losses carry forward indefinitely. Skipping the return because no tax is due is how people quietly throw away a credit against a future gain.

Does Revenue actually know about my crypto? Increasingly, yes. Service providers have been collecting reportable user and transaction data since 1 January 2026 under CARF and DAC8, with the first returns due to Revenue by 31 May 2027 and information exchanged internationally from September 2027. The reasonable planning assumption for anything from 2026 onwards is that your exchange activity is visible.

Related reading

• Capital gains tax in Ireland
• Claiming your PAYE tax back for the first time
• Moving to Ireland: how cross-border taxes work