Crypto Reporting Rules: What Your Exchange Reports to the Tax Office, and Why the Total Is Not Your Profit

For the current year, your crypto exchange will for the first time report to Germany's Federal Central Tax Office what you have bought, sold and swapped. That report, however, contains not a single figure describing your profit. What it contains are aggregated gross amounts per crypto-asset: the sum of your purchases, the sum of your sales and the market value of every swap from one cryptocurrency into another. Anyone who reshuffles thirty times a year shows up there with a volume that is a multiple of their own portfolio value, while what is left at year-end may be a three-digit gain.

The legal basis is called the Kryptowerte-Steuertransparenzgesetz, KStTG in officialese. It transposes the European DAC8 directive into German law and obliges providers of crypto-asset services to transmit data about their customers to a central federal authority, which passes it on to the tax authorities of the federal states. Under the application provision in Section 21 KStTG, these duties apply for the first time to the 2026 calendar year. The year now running is therefore the first one on the books.

This article explains which details the report contains, why the sums named in it are systematically larger than anything you have ever owned, and how to keep your own records so that they line up with that report.

What Does Your Crypto Exchange Report to the Tax Office?

The catalogue of details to be reported is set out in Section 11 KStTG and is surprisingly concrete. It falls into two parts: details about you as a person, and details about your transactions.

On the personal side, the provider reports your name, address, tax identification number and the country or countries in which you are tax resident. Your place of birth is added where the provider is obliged under domestic law to obtain it. These details come from the tax self-certification your provider asks you to complete.

The second part is the interesting one. It is drawn up separately for each type of crypto-asset, once for one cryptocurrency, once for the next. For each type, the provider reports:

• for purchases against a fiat currency, the aggregate gross amount paid, the number of units and the number of transactions,
• for sales against a fiat currency, the aggregate gross amount received, again with units and transaction count,
• for purchases against other crypto-assets, the aggregate fair market value, the units and the number of operations,
• for sales against other crypto-assets, the same three details,
• for retail payment transactions, meaning payments to merchants, likewise market value, units and count,
• for other transfers to you or from you, the aggregate market value, the units and the count, broken down by type of transfer where the provider knows it.

Two terms are worth unpacking. Aggregate means that individual operations are not transmitted; what is transmitted is the annual total per crypto-asset and direction. The fair market value is the value a crypto-asset had on the market at the moment of the transaction, expressed in a fiat currency; it is needed because a coin-to-coin swap moves no euro amount that could be reported.

What is missing from that list matters as much as what is in it: no acquisition date per purchase, no acquisition price per individual unit, no gain, no loss, no holding period.

Why the Reported Gross Total Is Larger Than Your Portfolio

A gross amount is the full amount of a transaction, with no acquisition costs, fees or losses netted off. That is exactly how the reporting works. And because purchases, sales and swaps are each added up separately, the reported total grows with every movement while your wealth can stay unchanged.

The reason lies in how the law is built. The authority is meant to be able to see that there is something at your end worth examining. Working out the tax remains your job.

A Worked Example With Its Assumptions on the Table

Suppose you transfer 5,000 euros to your exchange in January and buy Bitcoin with it. Over the year you shift back and forth between two cryptocurrencies twenty times, each time with a counter-value of around 5,000 euros. In December you sell back into euros for 5,800 euros.

The report will then say roughly the following: 5,000 euros in gross amount paid on purchases against euros, 5,800 euros in gross amount received on sales against euros, and on the swaps an aggregate market value in the order of 100,000 euros, spread across both crypto-assets involved. Your actual increase is 800 euros. The largest figure in the data set is about a hundred and twenty times the size of your gain.

The numbers in this example are set, not measured. Their only purpose is to show the arithmetic mechanics. Anyone who trades actively should expect their own report to contain magnitudes that look wrong without an explanation.

Coin for Coin: Why Every Swap Lands in the Report With a Market Value

Many people regard switching from one cryptocurrency into another as an operation inside their own portfolio. For tax purposes it is nothing of the kind. Under Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act, a swap counts as a disposal of the asset given up and at the same time as an acquisition of the one received. For the holding period that means the clock for the new coin starts at zero.

The reporting duty maps this operation twice. The crypto-asset given up appears as a sale against other crypto-assets, the one received as a purchase against other crypto-assets. In both cases the market value at the time of the transaction is applied, converted into a single fiat currency, and under Section 11(3) KStTG the provider must carry out that conversion consistently in the same way throughout.

From this follows a practical consequence that is easily overlooked: one and the same swap generates two entries, and anyone working with four different crypto-assets spreads their annual volume across four separate positions in the data set. Your own statement therefore has to be kept per crypto-asset as well, otherwise it cannot be reconciled with the report at all. Tools that produce exactly this breakdown automatically can be found in our comparison of crypto tax software and portfolio trackers; what matters there is less the range of features than whether the tool documents the market value at the time of the swap cleanly.

For the tax itself, the exemption threshold from Section 23(3) sentence 5 of the Income Tax Act continues to apply: gains remain tax-free if the total gain from private disposal transactions in the calendar year is below 1,000 euros. An exemption threshold is not an allowance. Once it is exceeded, the entire gain is taxable, and not merely the part above it.

What Happens to Transfers to Your Own Wallet?

This point concerns everyone who moves holdings off an exchange. A self-custodial wallet is a wallet whose private key you hold yourself and which is not assigned to any provider. If your exchange transfers coins to such an address, it reports under Section 11(1) no. 2(b) the aggregate market value and the number of units for transfers to addresses about which it does not know whether they are linked to a provider or a financial institution.

The decisive clause is: about which it does not know. As a rule, your exchange has no idea that the destination address belongs to you. From its point of view, value is leaving the house. The data set arriving at the authority therefore shows an outflow with a market value, without the information that the coins still belong to you.

For you that means nothing more than that you have to be able to evidence this transfer. The proof consists of the outgoing entry at the exchange and the incoming entry at an address assigned to your wallet. Anyone moving their holdings into self-custody anyway should document the receiving addresses from the start; which devices are suitable for that is shown in our hardware wallet comparison.

Which Providers Fall Under the KStTG and Which Do Not

The scope is set out in Section 2 KStTG and distinguishes two groups. Covered first are crypto-asset service providers whose home member state, within the meaning of the European regulation on markets in crypto-assets, is the Federal Republic of Germany. The home member state is the EU country in which a provider obtained its authorisation.

Covered second are so-called crypto-asset operators with a domestic nexus, meaning providers without European authorisation that are tax resident in Germany, have their registered office or management there, or carry out their regular business activity there.

Double reporting is ruled out. Subsections 2 to 5 of Section 2 exempt an operator from the German duties where it already fulfils comparable duties in another EU member state or in a qualified third country. For you as a user that changes little: whether the data travels via Germany or via another country, it ends up at the tax office responsible for you, because the states involved exchange the data sets. That is precisely the purpose of the underlying EU Directive 2023/2226.

Not covered is whatever takes place without a provider. A decentralised exchange with no operator, a direct transfer between two self-custodial wallets, a swap through a pure protocol: for such operations there is nobody the law could put under an obligation. That does not make them tax-free. All that is missing is a third party's report. Your duty to declare to the tax office exists regardless of whether a third party transmits the same data. Anyone deliberately preferring regulated providers, because documentation and authorisation are settled there, will find the overview among the regulated crypto exchanges.

When Reporting Starts and Which Deadlines Count for You

The reporting period is the calendar year, under Section 10 KStTG. Reporting takes place annually under Section 9(1), by 31 July at the latest for the preceding reporting period. Together with the application provision from Section 21, that yields the first date: the 2026 data goes to the Federal Central Tax Office by 31 July 2027.

Two further deadlines concern you directly. For business relationships entered into up to 31 December 2025, the provider must have completed the due diligence duties under Section 7(2) by 1 January 2027; this is why many providers are currently sending out requests for tax self-certification. If you do not respond, Section 8 kicks in: the request is followed by a reminder and a formal notice, and after 90 days at the latest, though not before 60 days have elapsed, the provider has to prevent you from carrying out reportable transactions. What that means day to day we have described in detail along the course of this block: self-certification at the crypto exchange and the looming account block.

Section 13 is the more pleasant one. Under it, your provider must inform you before the first report that data is being collected and passed on, and do so early enough for you to exercise your rights. That notification is no marketing letter. In it the provider discloses what is being transmitted about you, and that is the best moment to lay your own figures alongside.

Who the Fines Hit

Section 18 KStTG makes a series of breaches punishable as administrative offences, in the more serious cases with fines of up to fifty thousand euros. The addressee of that provision is the provider, not the private user. An investor who fails to submit a self-certification risks the trading block under Section 8 rather than this fine. The tax consequences of an incomplete return continue to follow the Fiscal Code.

What the Report Does Not Say About You

Your tax liability cannot be calculated from the catalogue in Section 11. Four details needed for that are missing.

The acquisition date of the individual unit is missing. What is reported is the number of transactions in the year, not the day of each one. Whether a unit that was sold met the one-year holding period of Section 23 of the Income Tax Act therefore does not appear in the data set.

The acquisition costs of the specific unit disposed of are missing. What is reported is an annual total of all purchases, from which it cannot be derived which purchase belongs to which sale.

The holding you had at the start and at the end of the year is missing. And any link between your accounts at different providers is missing, because each provider knows only its own figures.

That makes it clear who has to fill the gap. Your return is the only place where aggregated gross amounts turn into a traceable gain. And it stands or falls with records you have secured yourself, before a provider halts trading or closes an account. Why that is no theoretical worry is shown by our piece on exporting your transaction history before an account is closed.

How to Make Your Own Statement Match the Report

The goal is a modest one: if somebody lays the reported totals next to your statement, the two sides should fit together. For that you need six details per crypto-asset and per calendar year.

• the sum of your purchases against euros, with the number of operations,
• the sum of your sales against euros, likewise with the count,
• the market value of all swaps, separated by incoming and outgoing side,
• all coin deposits and withdrawals with date, quantity and destination address,
• for each unit disposed of, the acquisition date and the acquisition costs,
• the holding as at 1 January and as at 31 December.

The first three lines establish the reconciliation with the report. The last three are what the report precisely does not contain and what determines your tax.

Which Order You Assume

FIFO stands for first in, first out and means that on a sale the units acquired first count as the ones disposed of first. The tax administration expects a method you apply uniformly per wallet or account and consistently across the years. Anyone switching method mid-year produces a statement that can no longer be audited.

Common Misunderstandings About the Crypto Reporting Rules

The Tax Office Now Knows My Profit

No. It knows gross totals per crypto-asset and the number of operations. The profit only emerges from acquisition dates and acquisition costs, which are absent from the report.

If I Stay Below the Exemption Threshold, Nothing Is Reported

That does not hold either. The provider's reporting duty does not depend on whether any tax arises at your end. Reporting happens as soon as reportable transactions have taken place, whatever your result.

A Transfer to My Own Wallet Is Invisible

The opposite is the case. Transfers to addresses not assigned to any provider are precisely the ones reported under Section 11 with market value and unit count. What is invisible, at most, is that the address belongs to you, and that is exactly the circumstance you have to evidence yourself if it comes to it.

Checking the Crypto Reporting Rules: What to Take Away

1. Pull your annual statement while you still can. Download the full trading history for the current year from every provider and store it away from the exchange. A tool that turns it into an auditable statement per crypto-asset can be found in our comparison of crypto tax software.
2. Answer your provider's self-certification before the deadline runs. Tax identification number and residence belong in the data set anyway; anyone who fails to respond loses access to reportable transactions after 60 to 90 days. How the providers are set up for this is shown in the overview of regulated crypto exchanges.
3. Document every withdrawal to an address of your own. Note the date, the quantity and the receiving address, and record which device the address belongs to, so that a reported outflow remains explainable later as a move rather than a sale. Which devices are suitable for that is covered in the hardware wallet comparison.

(As of September 13, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)