The UK HMRC has released data on capital gains from crypto assets for the first time: for the 2024-2025 tax year, 17,600 individuals reported capital gains tax on crypto disposals, totaling £1.38 billion, averaging about £78,000 per person.

During the same period, the total income from crypto asset disposals was £13.8 billion, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin. 240 individuals reported gains exceeding £1 million each, totaling £717 million, accounting for approximately 52% of all taxable gains, while representing only about 1.4% of the filers.

Among the filers, about 87% were male and 13% were female, with the majority aged between 35 and 44. This is the first official breakdown since a dedicated section for crypto asset capital gains was added to self-assessment tax forms, as previously such earnings were mixed with total capital gains and could not be itemized separately.

The total capital gains tax collected in the UK was £24.2 billion, an increase of 89% year-on-year, marking the highest annual collection since 1987; the number of taxpayers was 584,000, a 45% increase year-on-year. Former Chancellor Rachel Reeves proposed raising the capital gains tax rate from 10%-28% to 18%-32% in the 2024 budget. The total reported gains across all asset classes amounted to £127 billion, an 82% increase year-on-year. London and the South East contributed about half of the tax revenue; less than 1% of taxpayers with gains of £5 million or more contributed about 45% of the total collection.

The tax authority stated that compliance and outreach efforts are expected to generate an additional £168 million in capital gains tax for the 2024-2025 fiscal year, with crypto not itemized separately. For the 2025-2026 fiscal year, over 81,000 warning letters have been sent to taxpayers suspected of underreporting or failing to report crypto gains, approximately three times the number from the previous year. The OECD's crypto asset reporting framework requires service providers to submit client information to tax authorities, and the UK will begin receiving and cross-referencing self-assessment submissions starting in 2027.

In this context, sellers are holders cashing out, while buyers are market counterparties taking over; the tax authority collects capital gains at the disposal stage, not on holding. Funds move from on-chain positions into fiat tax forms, then into the treasury. Beneficiaries include the fiscal system and the upcoming data from exchanges; those under pressure are high-concentration whales and accounts not yet covered by service providers. This is the first exposure after the system's rollout, not a total survey of on-chain amounts.

Source: Public Information