HMRC: 240 UK filers booked £1m+ crypto gains

HMRC now has its first official read on how much capital gains UK filers declare on crypto, and it shows 240 people reporting more than £1 million each for the 2024 to 2025 tax year, per its news release and the accompanying Capital Gains Tax commentary. Read the "crypto millionaires" label carefully: it means £1 million or more in declared gains, not net worth, and it counts only CGT-liable individual disposals that people actually reported, not every profit made on crypto in Britain. The dollar figure of about $1.3 million circulating on the wires is just £1 million converted, not a second threshold.

Name the instrument

This is a set of accredited official statistics, not a tax-rate change, a new crypto tax or an enforcement raid. The 2024 to 2025 return is the first to carry a dedicated Self Assessment box for cryptoasset disposals, so HMRC can separate crypto gains from the rest of Capital Gains Tax for the first time. The commentary defines the crypto figure precisely as the difference between cryptoasset gains reported in box 14.3 and cryptoasset losses reported in box 13.5 of the SA108 pages. Because this is the first year of that box, there is no comparable time series yet, and the numbers cover individuals rather than trusts.

The numbers, and where they concentrate

Across the year, 17,600 individuals made CGT-liable cryptoasset disposals, reporting £1.38 billion in total gains on £13.8 billion of disposal proceeds, for an average gain of about £78,000. Roughly 87% of those taxpayers were male and 13% female. The £717 million booked by the 240 top filers is the fact the headline number hides: it means the millionaires alone account for a bit over half of all the crypto gains reported, from a group that is less than 2% of these taxpayers. At the other end, filers with gains under £25,000 make up 65% of the total but account for just 7% of the gains. This is a steeply concentrated pool, not a broad-based windfall.

Keep the crypto slice in proportion to the whole. The same commentary puts total capital gains across all assets at £127 billion and total CGT liabilities at £24.2 billion for the year, and crypto is not broken out of that tax figure, so the £1.38 billion in crypto gains is a small corner of UK capital gains rather than a large share of the tax take.

The compliance pipe is still being built

HMRC frames the disclosure as a nudge as much as a count. James Murray MP put the message bluntly: "Taxes are due on cryptoasset gains just like any other gains." HMRC also estimates it brought in an extra £168 million of Capital Gains Tax in 2024-25 through upstream compliance and education work since late 2023, a figure to read as the department's own estimate rather than an audited result.

The larger reporting change is not in these numbers yet. The UK began implementing the OECD Cryptoasset Reporting Framework, or CARF, from January 2026, and HMRC will start receiving data directly from cryptoasset service providers in 2027, with non-compliant providers facing penalties of up to £300 per user. That is a future data feed that will make disposals far harder to leave off a return, so the 2024-25 figures are a pre-CARF baseline, not the post-matching picture.

What to do

If you disposed of crypto, work out now whether it counts and whether it is on your return, because the honesty-based baseline in these numbers is about to meet provider data. A disposal is not only a sale for cash: exchanging one token for another, spending crypto on goods, and gifting it to anyone other than a spouse or a charity all trigger a potential CGT event. The 2025-26 Self Assessment deadline is January 31, 2027, the same year HMRC starts receiving CARF reports, and the Crypto Disclosure Service exists for gains from earlier years that were never declared. Fix the back years before the provider data does it for you.

For related policy coverage, see our reporting on the Treasury's GENIUS Act stablecoin rules and the New York Fed on stablecoins and the Mundell-Fleming trilemma.