Crypto tax reporting in the EU

Selling crypto for fiat is a disposal almost everywhere. Swapping one crypto asset for another is also treated as a disposal in most member states — a point that catches out people who never converted to euros and assumed nothing happened. Spending crypto on goods or services is generally a disposal too.

Income is a separate category: interest or rewards on balances, referral payments and payments received for work are typically taxed as income at the value on the day received, and that value becomes the cost basis if you later dispose of the asset.

• Crypto sold for fiat — usually a disposal
• Crypto swapped for crypto — usually a disposal
• Crypto spent at a merchant — usually a disposal
• Interest, rewards and referral payments — usually income
• Transfers between your own wallets — normally not a disposal

The tax is calculated on the gain, which means every disposal needs a matching acquisition price. Member states prescribe different matching methods — average cost in some, first-in-first-out in others — and using the wrong one produces a wrong number even with perfect records.

Fees usually adjust the basis: the acquisition cost includes what you paid to acquire, and disposal proceeds are net of what you paid to sell. Statements that show the fee separately from the amount are therefore worth considerably more than a bare net figure.

DAC8 extends EU administrative cooperation to crypto-asset transactions, requiring reporting providers to collect and report user and transaction information to tax authorities, which then exchange it between member states. Reporting under the regime applies from 2026 for the 2026 reporting period.

The practical consequence is that your tax authority increasingly receives an independent record of your activity. Filing that matches your provider's data is straightforward; filing that contradicts it is what generates enquiries. Reconciling your own records against provider statements before filing is now the cheap insurance.

For each transaction you want: date and time, asset, quantity, unit price in your reporting currency, fee, transaction type, and the counterparty or wallet where relevant. On-chain transaction hashes are worth retaining because they let anyone reconstruct the movement independently.

Keep them for the retention period your country requires — commonly five to ten years — and keep them in a format you can still read. A CSV export stored alongside the PDF statement survives a change of provider; a screenshot does not.

Every account can export statement transactions as CSV or PDF, with fees itemised rather than netted, and the annual tax report generator assembles disposals, acquisitions and income for a calendar year in one document.

Reconciliation tools compare ledger balances against transaction history so gaps surface before filing rather than during an enquiry. What the bank cannot do is choose your matching method or file for you — that remains a conversation with a local adviser.