Invest2 distinct publishers3 min readPublished
The first year with a crypto box on the Self Assessment return shows a base narrow enough to fit in one room. That changes both what a rate rise would collect and what the 2027 exchange data feed is worth chasing.
The Investor · Invest desk
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The conversion rate is where this data earns its keep. £13.8bn of disposals produced £1.38bn of taxable gains [2], a margin of 10.0% [1], which means roughly £12.42bn of that gross flow was cost basis coming back out again [2], and since swapping one cryptoasset for another is itself a disposal [14], some unknown slice of the £13.8bn never touched sterling.
Split it by age and the spread widens. The 25 to 44 band supplied 71% of proceeds and kept 45% of the gains [6], which works out at a 6.3% margin against 19.0% for everyone 45 and over [8][9], so the group doing most of the volume converts at about a third of the older group's rate [10]. Men were 87% of filers and took 93% of the gains [8].
Below the millionaires the distribution is unremarkable. Strip out the 240 and the remaining 17,360 filers shared £663m, or £38,190 each [6], against £2.9875m each at the top [5], a gap of 78 to one [7]. The 65% reporting under £25,000 come to about 11,440 people [11] holding £96.6m of gains between them, £8,444 apiece [12]. And because HMRC puts more than half of the proceeds with the same 240 [4], their own conversion margin is at most 10.4% [15], so what separates them is size rather than edge.
That is the figure that should govern enforcement design, and does not appear to. The 81,000 nudge letters sent in the past year, on UHY Hacker Young's count [9], outnumber the people who actually filed a crypto disposal by 4.6 to one [13], and letter volume has gone from 27,714 in 2023-24 [10] to 81,000, a 2.9-fold rise in two years [14]. Every one of those letters is officer time not spent reconciling the 240 returns that hold half the money.
This is probably wrong, but the provider data HMRC expects in 2027 [11] looks likelier to surface a very large number of four-figure liabilities than a second cohort of millionaires, and four-figure liabilities are expensive to collect one at a time. The counter-thesis, which is roughly what Neela Chauhan of UHY Hacker Young means when she says investigations will be "like shooting fish in a barrel" once the data lands [13], is that the declared distribution measures who knew to fill in the new box rather than who made the money, and the missing middle sits offshore where a 2024-25 return could not reach it.
Two results would break my read. If the 2027 provider data shows undeclared gains averaging anything close to the £78,000 mean of declared filers [2] rather than the tail's £8,444 [12], the volume campaign is aimed correctly and the arithmetic above is a distraction. And if roughly 240 millionaire filers turn up again next year, HMRC is taxing a standing base rather than one cycle's exits, or rather, the more interesting version of that: a standing base of 240 people who can change residence faster than the Treasury can rewrite a rate.
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HMRC split cryptoasset gains out from the rest of the capital gains figures for the first time, covering the 2024-25 tax year, which was the first year the Self Assessment return carried a dedicated section for cryptoasset disposals.
For 2024-25, 17,600 individuals filed taxable crypto asset capital gains, reporting £13.8bn in disposal proceeds and £1.38bn in total gains, an average gain per individual of £78,000.
HMRC said 240 people each reported more than £1m in crypto capital gains during 2024-25, with that millionaire cohort accounting for £717m of the total gains.
The 240 millionaire filers are less than 2% of all those who reported a crypto disposal, and HMRC's commentary ascribes more than half of the gains and of the £13.8bn of disposal proceeds to them.
65% of crypto taxpayers reported gains of under £25,000, and that majority accounted for only 7% of the gains and 8% of the proceeds.
71% of all proceeds from crypto disposals came from people aged 25 to 44, but that age group took only 45% of the gains.
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1 article · August 28, 2026
1 article · August 28, 2026
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One release, two retellings
Every load-carrying figure — 17,600 filers, £13.8bn of proceeds, £1.38bn of gains, the 240 millionaires — comes from a single HMRC statistics publication reported the next morning by both outlets. Neither checked it, and neither could: the tax authority is the only body able to count boxes on Self Assessment returns. That makes the numbers authoritative and singly sourced at the same time. The distribution and demographic splits appear only in Cryptopolitan, the 2023-24 letter baseline and the filing deadline only in The Block, so several specifics stand on one account each. And because 2024-25 is the first year with a crypto box, there is no prior year against which anything here can be sanity-checked.
17,600 declarers, 81,000 letters
The new crypto box works — it produced hard counts in its first year — but what it counted is small. 17,600 people declared a disposal in a country where HMRC saw fit to post 81,000 warning letters, so the compliant population is outnumbered 4.6 to one by the population HMRC suspects. Concentration compounds the thinness: 240 filers hold about 52% of the gains, and the 11,440 at the bottom average £8,444 each. The mechanism that would widen the base, the automatic exchange feed, started as a rulebook in January 2026 and delivers no records until 2027.
The numbers behave; the forecast does not
HMRC's figures are not oversold anywhere in this reporting — if anything the headline concentration is understated by the £78,000 average both outlets quote, which no real filer resembles. The stretch is forward-looking. 'Shooting fish in a barrel' comes from a partner at an accountancy firm that bills for defending the investigations she is forecasting, it is the emotional peak of both stories, and it describes a data feed that has not yet transmitted a single record. Cryptopolitan closes on the quote with nothing after it.
Everyone quoted has a stake
The Block discloses in-page that Foresight Ventures holds a majority stake and that Bitget is an anchor LP of that fund — an unusual level of candour, and a reminder that both outlets are crypto trade press writing for the exact people HMRC is mailing. The letter counts and jurisdiction tallies do not come from HMRC at all; they come from UHY Hacker Young, whose practice grows with every investigation it predicts, and Cryptopolitan quietly reassigns that provenance to itself. HMRC's own interest is served too: publishing that 240 people cleared £1m each is deterrence as much as statistics.
Solid floor, soft ceiling
The floor is firm: two independent accounts of an official release agree on every overlapping figure, and the ratios in our reading — 10% gains on proceeds, 52% to the 240, 78 times the average of everyone else — follow from those figures by arithmetic alone. The ceiling is lower, because the single-source items cannot be cross-checked, the first-year form change leaves no baseline, and the story's most forceful claim about what happens next is one adviser's forecast.