HMRC reveals how much money UK crypto investors are really making
Key Points
- HMRC has counted UK cryptoasset gains separately for the first time.
- 17,600 people declared £1.38 billion of gains on £13.8 billion of disposals.
- Men made up 87% of crypto taxpayers and 93% of gains.
- Under 2% of crypto taxpayers accounted for over half the gains.
- Total Capital Gains Tax hit a record £24.2 billion in 2024/25.
HMRC has published the first official count of UK cryptoasset gains, showing 17,600 people declared £1.38 billion of profits on £13.8 billion of disposals in the 2024/25 tax year.
Cryptoasset disposals now occupy their own section of the SA108 Self Assessment page, a change HMRC introduced for the 2024/25 tax year. Before that, taxpayers folded crypto into the wider “other property, assets and gains” box alongside everything from artwork to foreign currency.
Men made up 87% of everyone reporting crypto gains, against 56% of Capital Gains Tax payers as a whole, and they accounted for 93% of the gains themselves.
The crypto-paying population also skews young. 81% of those reporting gains were aged 54 or under, and 54% fell between 25 and 44.
Only 17% of all Capital Gains Tax payers sat in that 25 to 44 bracket in the same year.
That younger group reported 71% of all crypto disposal proceeds but took only 45% of the gains, trading far more than they kept.
Most of the money sits with very few people
Taxpayers reporting crypto gains above £1 million accounted for more than half of all disposal proceeds and gains, despite making up under 2% of the crypto-paying population.
At the other end, 65% of crypto taxpayers reported gains below £25,000, and between them they contributed 8% of proceeds and 7% of gains.
HMRC does not publish a tax figure for crypto, because liabilities on cryptoassets sit alongside other assets charged at the main rates of Capital Gains Tax. The department also left trusts out of the table entirely to avoid identifying individual taxpayers.
The crypto figures landed inside a record year for the tax as a whole. Total Capital Gains Tax liabilities reached £24.2 billion in 2024/25, an 89% rise on the previous year, and taxpayer numbers hit an all-time high of 584,000.
“These figures suggest crypto investing remains heavily concentrated among male investors, but the bigger story is the scale,” said Shaun Moore, Tax and Financial Planning Expert at Quilter.
“Crypto is no longer sitting on the fringes of the tax system. Billions of pounds of gains are now being reported to HMRC, meaning crypto taxation is increasingly becoming a mainstream financial planning consideration alongside more traditional investments.”
HMRC publishes the statistics annually, with the next update due in August 2027.
