Two hundred and forty filers above a million
The first UK tax year with a dedicated crypto section puts numbers on a population that was previously a matter of estimate.
2 minInstitutional Crypto
HM Revenue and Customs published statistics on Thursday for the 2024-25 tax year, the first in which the UK return carried a dedicated section for crypto asset capital gains. The figures are therefore the first of their kind rather than another estimate.
- 17,600 individuals filed crypto asset capital gains.
- 13.8 billion pounds, or 18.76 billion dollars, in disposal proceeds.
- 1.38 billion pounds, or 1.87 billion dollars, in total gains.
- 78,000 pounds, or 106,000 dollars, average gain.
- 240 filers each reported more than one million pounds.
The distribution is the part worth sitting with. An average gain of 78,000 pounds across 17,600 filers describes an ordinary-looking population. Two hundred and forty of them each reported more than a million, which is where the aggregate is actually coming from.
The gap between proceeds and gains is also informative: 13.8 billion pounds of disposals produced 1.38 billion pounds of gains, a ratio of ten to one. That is what a market of long-held positions and heavy churn looks like when it finally files a return.
For an institutional reader the significance is not the size of the numbers, which are modest against UK capital gains as a whole. It is that a dedicated line on a tax return converts a category previously reconstructed from exchange data into a reported one, and reported figures are what regulators build on next.
Retold from The Block. This is a summary in our own words; follow the link for the original reporting.