How to File Crypto Taxes in Germany

How to file crypto taxes in Germany: what §23 EStG actually says about the one-year holding period, the €1,000 threshold, how staking and lending are treated, the Anlage SO section for Kryptowerte, and the two changes — DAC8/KStTG reporting and the proposed abolition of the holding period — that make the 2026 filing season different.

This page is general information, not tax advice, and it is not a substitute for a Steuerberater. German crypto taxation rests on administrative guidance (BMF letters) and case law that continues to move, and a legislative proposal currently before the Bundestag would change the core rule from 2027. Nothing here creates a safe harbour. If your position is material, get professional advice before you file.

What Germany actually taxes

Germany does not treat cryptoassets as securities for private investors. They are "other assets" (sonstige Wirtschaftsgüter), which puts a disposal by a private individual inside § 23 EStG — the rules for private sale transactions (private Veräußerungsgeschäfte). Two consequences follow, and they define almost everything else on this page.

First, the one-year holding period. If more than one year lies between acquisition and disposal, the gain is not taxable at all. Inside one year, the gain is added to your other income and taxed at your personal income tax rate — which runs from 0% up to 45%, plus the solidarity surcharge where it still applies to you and church tax if you are a member. There is no flat 25% Abgeltungsteuer on this category, which is exactly why the reform proposal described below matters.

Second, the €1,000 threshold. Gains from all private sale transactions in a calendar year — crypto plus anything else in the category — stay tax-free up to €1,000. This is a Freigrenze, not a Freibetrag: exceed it by a single euro and the entire amount becomes taxable, not just the excess. The figure was €600 for earlier years and was raised to €1,000; if you are cleaning up an older year, use the threshold that applied to that year, not today's.

A disposal is not only a sale for euros. Swapping BTC for ETH is a disposal of the BTC. Paying for something in crypto is a disposal. Bridging or moving coins between your own wallets is not.

Staking, lending, mining and airdrops

Rewards are a separate question from disposals, and they sit in a different box. For a private investor, staking and lending rewards are generally other income under § 22 Nr. 3 EStG, taxable at receipt at the fair market value on that date. That category has its own, much smaller threshold: €256 per year, again a Freigrenze rather than an allowance.

The BMF letter of 6 March 2025 — the current administrative guidance, which replaced the May 2022 letter — addresses the timing question directly for passive staking: the moment of acquisition can be taken as the point the reward is booked into the wallet, i.e. claiming. Active participation in block creation (forging) is treated differently and carries stricter evidentiary requirements. Mining, and staking run at scale with your own infrastructure, can tip over into a commercial activity (Gewerbebetrieb), which changes the category entirely: business income, trade tax, an EÜR, and no one-year exemption on the coins held as business assets.

One historical point worth stating plainly because outdated guides still repeat it: the extended ten-year holding period under § 23 Abs. 1 Nr. 2 Satz 4 EStG does not apply to crypto used for staking or lending. That extension was removed with effect from assessment period 2023. Using coins to earn yield does not reset or lengthen your one-year clock.

Rewards you receive start their own one-year clock, with a cost basis equal to the value taxed on receipt. Selling a staking reward three months after claiming it is therefore a second taxable event under § 23, on top of the income already recognised. Airdrops turn on whether you did anything to earn them; the classification is fact-specific and worth a professional opinion where amounts are meaningful. NFTs and liquidity mining were deliberately left out of the March 2025 letter and remain unsettled.

What changed for the 2026 season

DAC8 and the Kryptowerte-Steuertransparenzgesetz (KStTG). From 1 January 2026, crypto-asset service providers operating in the EU — exchanges, brokers, custodial wallet providers and many other intermediaries — must collect and report user transaction data. In Germany the KStTG implements this; the first reporting period is calendar year 2026, with reports due to the Bundeszentralamt für Steuern by 31 July 2027, after which the data is exchanged automatically between member states. Penalties for late, incomplete or incorrect reporting reach €50,000 per case for providers. The practical effect for you: the Finanzamt will, from the 2026 year onwards, receive exchange data it previously did not have. Filings that quietly omitted a centralised exchange are no longer a viable strategy.

The proposed abolition of the holding period. Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil put the removal of the crypto holding period into his budget plans, and the federal cabinet approved the budget draft containing it on 6 July 2026. The stated intent is to tax crypto gains like capital income — a flat rate plus solidarity surcharge — with a target start date of 1 January 2027. As of today this is not law. There is no enacted statute, the parliamentary process has not run, coalition partners are not aligned, and whether existing holdings would get grandfathering (Bestandsschutz) is explicitly unresolved in the current draft. For the return you are filing now, the one-year rule applies unchanged. Do not restructure a portfolio on the basis of a budget line; do watch the Bundestag process before making irreversible decisions late in 2026.

What you'll need (prerequisites)

• Complete transaction history from every exchange and wallet
• Crypto tax software (Koinly, CoinTracker, or similar)
• Germany tax-residency status confirmed
• Most recent annual statements from each platform

Add one more: an ELSTER account, or a Steuerberater who will file for you. And be honest about the first item. The March 2025 BMF letter contains, for the first time, an explicit chapter on declaration, cooperation and record-keeping duties. Tax offices are no longer expected to wave through any software-generated report; you can be asked to produce detailed transaction lists, the raw export files, the tax report itself, and verifiable price data for both acquisition and disposal. There is a non-objection for assessment periods up to and including 2024 regarding price determination under the older rules and record-keeping outside the GoBD framework — but that grace does not extend to 2025 and later. Separately, if your positive surplus income exceeds €500,000 in a year, § 147a AO imposes a six-year retention duty on the underlying records; that threshold rises to €750,000 from 2027.

Step-by-step

1. Step 1: Aggregate all transactions

   Pull CSV exports from every exchange you used (Coinbase, Kraken, Binance, etc.) and add wallet addresses for on-chain activity. Coverage is everything — even a single missing trade can cascade into wrong cost basis for every subsequent disposal.

2. Step 2: Import into crypto tax software

   Koinly, CoinTracker, CoinLedger, Accointing and ZenLedger all support Germany. Import the CSVs and link the wallet addresses. The software auto-classifies trades, transfers, swaps, staking rewards, and airdrops.

3. Step 3: Reconcile mis-tagged transactions

   Expect the software to flag ambiguous events rather than resolve them: cross-platform transfers (which look like sales), bridge hops, LP token mints and burns, rebasing tokens, and rewards that arrived without an obvious counterparty. Work through every warning and correct the classification. This is the step that determines whether your holding periods and cost bases are right, and it is the step people skip.

4. Step 4: Apply the German method rules

   Set the software's jurisdiction to Germany so it applies § 23 EStG. The BMF's method rules are wallet-based (walletbezogene Betrachtung): the order of use is determined per wallet, not across your whole portfolio. Where individual identification of specific units is not possible, the earliest-acquired units of a given trading designation count as sold first for the purpose of the holding period, with the average method for valuation — and, as a simplification, FIFO may be assumed for valuation too. Whichever method you pick within a wallet must be kept until every unit of that designation in that wallet has been disposed of. Do not mix a long-term stack and an active trading balance in the same wallet if you can avoid it.

5. Step 5: Generate the tax report

   Export the Germany-specific report. You want three things out of it: the taxable § 23 gains and losses for disposals inside one year, a separate list of § 22 Nr. 3 income events (staking, lending, and similar) with their receipt-date values, and a full transaction ledger you can hand over if asked. Keep the raw CSVs and wallet exports alongside the PDF, not just the summary.

6. Step 6: Enter the figures in Anlage SO

   Private investors report through Anlage SO, which from tax year 2025 contains a dedicated Kryptowerte section: one part for private sale transactions with cryptoassets (fiat sales, crypto-to-crypto swaps and payments where less than a year passed), and a second part for related income such as mining, forging, passive staking, lending and airdrops. In ELSTER, add the form via "Anlagen hinzufügen/entfernen" if it is not already attached. An EÜR is only relevant if your activity is commercial — that is a different filing path, not an alternative to Anlage SO for ordinary investors.

7. Step 7: Meet the deadline, then keep the evidence

   The self-filed deadline is 31 July of the year following the tax year — 31 July 2026 for tax year 2025. If a Steuerberater or a Lohnsteuerhilfeverein files for you, the deadline extends well into the following year; the statutory dates were repeatedly shifted after 2020 and are still normalising, so confirm the current date for your specific assessment year rather than relying on a figure in an article. Afterwards, retain the reports and raw data — six years under § 147a AO if you are above the income threshold, and in practice at least that long for anyone with a non-trivial history.

Losses, and what is not a loss

Losses from crypto disposals sit inside § 23 and can only be set against gains from other private sale transactions — crypto, physical precious metals, art, real property sold inside the ten-year window. They cannot be offset against salary, interest, dividends or trading profits in other categories. Unused losses can be carried back one year and carried forward indefinitely under § 10d EStG, recorded in a loss assessment notice.

Two traps. The symmetry of the one-year rule means a position sold at a loss after more than a year gives you nothing: no taxable gain, and no deductible loss either. And harvesting a loss by selling and repurchasing the identical asset minutes later invites a § 42 AO abuse-of-law challenge — Germany has no crypto-specific wash-sale rule, but that is not the same as a green light. Real economic substance and a meaningful gap between the transactions are what make the position defensible.

Coins lost to a hack, a rug pull, an exchange collapse or a lost private key are the hardest case, and the common online claim that Germany "allows capital-loss treatment for verifiable theft" overstates it. The prevailing view is that these events are not disposals at all under § 23, so there is no § 23 loss to deduct. Alternative routes exist in theory and are disputed in practice. File a police report, preserve every piece of evidence, and take advice — do not simply book the loss and hope.

Common errors and fixes

• Missing exchange exports for a defunct platform. Reconstruct what you can from blockchain explorers, bank statements for fiat legs, and any email confirmations. If a gap is genuinely unrecoverable, document the gap itself and the method you used to estimate, and disclose it rather than silently filling it in.
• Transfer between own wallets flagged as a sale. Tag both sides as a transfer. Most tools auto-detect this once both addresses are linked, but cross-exchange moves and bridge hops routinely slip through and inflate your gains.
• Portfolio-wide FIFO instead of wallet-based. A default setting from another jurisdiction can silently produce the wrong holding periods. Check that the tool is applying the wallet-based order of use before you trust the output.
• Staking rewards not picked up. Chains where rewards accrue automatically (Cosmos, Solana and others) often need reward tracking enabled explicitly. Missing rewards understate § 22 Nr. 3 income and also leave those coins with a zero cost basis, overstating a later gain.
• Ignoring the €256 threshold. It is far easier to cross than people expect, and crossing it makes the whole amount taxable, not the excess.
• DeFi LP positions mis-priced. LP token mints and burns are frequently mis-tagged as trades. Review them in the tool's DeFi view. Liquidity mining is one of the areas the BMF explicitly left open, so document your treatment and be ready to explain it.
• Assuming euro conversion is automatic and correct. You need defensible price data per transaction. Where the tool's rate source is questionable for a thin token, keep the evidence for the rate you used.

When this DIY route is the wrong choice

Filing crypto yourself through ELSTER is reasonable for a straightforward year: a handful of exchanges, spot trades, some staking, everything reconcilable. Bring in a Steuerberater — ideally one who has done crypto before — in these cases:

• The activity may be commercial. High-frequency trading, mining at scale, running validators as a business, or trading on behalf of others can shift you from § 23 to business income, with trade tax and entirely different mechanics. The line is fact-specific and expensive to get wrong.
• Prior years were wrong or unfiled. Correcting an earlier return is a formal process, and with DAC8 data reaching the Finanzamt from the 2026 year the window for quiet self-correction is closing. This is squarely professional territory, including the question of whether a voluntary disclosure is appropriate.
• NFTs, liquidity mining, or exotic DeFi structures. The current BMF letter deliberately does not cover these. You are taking a position, not following guidance.
• You moved into or out of Germany during the year. Residency, exit taxation questions and double-tax treaties are not something a report generator handles.
• Company, trust or foundation holdings. Nothing on this page applies to assets held in a corporate vehicle.
• Six figures at stake. The cost of an advisor is small relative to the downside of a defensible-looking but wrong § 23 calculation across several years.

If you are filing in more than one country, our companion guides for the United States, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and France cover the equivalent rules; the Germany jurisdiction overview tracks the wider regulatory picture. Good record hygiene during the year makes all of this cheaper — see verifying a smart contract and revoking token approvals for the habits that keep your on-chain history clean and explicable.

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