HMRC Counts 240 UK Filers With Crypto Gains Above £1 Million

Britain's tax authority published its first breakdown of cryptoasset capital gains on 27 August, covering the 2024-25 tax year. It counted 17,600 people who made disposals liable to capital gains tax and reported £1.38 billion in gains on £13.8 billion of proceeds. Of those, 240 declared more than £1 million each, and between them they account for £717 million. The average gain across all filers was £78,000. Eighty-seven percent of the filers were men.

Half the gains sit with 240 people

The concentration is the finding, and the headlines round it differently. Against a total of £1.38 billion, the top group's £717 million works out at just under 52%. BeInCrypto called it "just over 50%", Cryptopolitan "over 51%", and The Crypto Times put 52% in its headline. HMRC's release says its figures are rounded and may not sum, so the share moves with whichever rounded inputs are used. Cryptopolitan adds that 65% of filers reported gains under £25,000, a majority accounting for 7% of the gains and 8% of the proceeds; that breakdown sits in one account and reads as its own working of the tables.

A younger group than the rest of the tax base

The demographic split is sharper than the headline number. Cryptopolitan's reading of the tables puts 54% of crypto filers in the 25 to 44 band, against 17% across the broader capital-gains population, with 81% aged 54 or younger. It also has men taking 93% of the gains while making up 87% of the filers. Those cuts appear in a single outlet and the summary release does not carry them. What the release does carry is the gender split itself, and it is not close.

The data HMRC has, and the data it does not

These numbers came from taxpayers, not from exchanges. HMRC added a dedicated cryptoasset section to the Self Assessment return, which is how the 2024-25 figures were gathered at all. The reporting machinery arrives later. The Cryptoasset Reporting Framework, an international standard obliging exchanges and custodians to hand customer data to tax authorities, took effect in January 2026; providers report on the 2026 calendar year, and HMRC receives the first files between 1 January and 31 May 2027, from 52 jurisdictions with 15 more joining in 2028. Providers that do not comply face up to £300 per customer.

"We want to make it as easy as possible for people to understand and meet their tax obligations when it comes to cryptoassets," John-Paul Marks, HMRC's permanent secretary, said.

Letters went out first

The prompting has been running for three years. The accountancy group UHY Hacker Young, whose figures FinanceFeeds carried on 20 August, counts about 81,000 nudge letters sent in 2025-26, against 64,982 the year before and roughly 27,700 in 2023-24. Neela Chauhan, a partner at the firm, told the outlet that UK crypto tax treatment is complex and that many individuals do not fully understand their reporting obligations. HMRC puts £168 million in extra capital gains tax down to compliance activity since late 2023. Other supervisors are building the same apparatus at their own pace, with Pakistan opening VASP licensing on a 5 September filing deadline and Britain's own next step a stablecoin innovation objective for the Bank of England.

How much of the market these figures reach is unsettled. BeInCrypto cites Chainalysis putting the reporting framework's coverage at 14% of on-chain taxable activity worldwide, with decentralised exchanges, peer-to-peer transfers and on-chain income making up the rest; that estimate sits in one account. The same outlet carries a Chainalysis figure of $19.4 billion in UK taxable crypto activity for 2025, which is not comparable to the declared gains: one counts activity over a calendar year in dollars, the other realised gains over a tax year in pounds. Setting them side by side would produce a shortfall neither dataset supports. The next filing deadline is 31 January 2027, and the first provider data lands four months after it.