Ireland Crypto Tax 2025: CGT, the 33% Rate, and the Four-Week Rule Most Reports Get Wrong

Revenue treats crypto disposals as ordinary Capital Gains Tax under Tax and Duty Manual 02-01-03: 33% on the gain, no special crypto rate, no crypto-specific exemption. But the identification rule behind the FIFO calculation - section 581 TCA 1997's four-week rule - is a genuine trap: it overrides plain FIFO in ways that can materially change both your gain and your loss position, and most crypto tax software ignores it entirely.

TL;DR

The baseline: crypto is CGT, not a special regime

Revenue's Tax and Duty Manual 02-01-03 is explicit that no new legislation was introduced for crypto-assets - the existing tax code applies based on what you actually did. For an individual holding and disposing of crypto as an investment, that means ordinary Capital Gains Tax rules: a disposal (sale, trade for another asset, or spend) triggers a chargeable gain or allowable loss equal to the euro-denominated proceeds less the euro-denominated cost, at the flat 33% rate. There's no reduced rate for crypto, no holding-period discount, and no annual crypto-specific allowance - the general capital gains framework governs, and the "profits from dealing in or exchanging crypto assets are treated as they would be for any other asset class" language in Revenue's own manual is the whole basis for that.

The exception is anyone whose crypto activity amounts to a trade of dealing in crypto-assets - frequency, organisation, and commercial character are the relevant factors, the same badges-of-trade test Revenue applies to shares or any other asset. If that threshold is met, the activity moves to ordinary Income Tax, PRSI and USC instead of CGT, with none of the reliefs discussed below.

What doesn't get applied automatically

Two things reduce the final liability but are deliberately not built into a generic calculation, because they're personal to the taxpayer and depend on facts outside any single tax year's transaction data: the EUR 1,270 annual personal exemption (once per person, per year, not transferable between spouses in a way that lets it stack), and any prior-year capital losses carried forward. A report showing your gross chargeable gain before these adjustments is a working paper, not your final tax bill - the return itself (Form CG1 lines 17-25, or the equivalent Form 11 panel) is where the exemption and any loss carryforward actually get applied.

Two payment periods, two deadlines - not one

Ireland doesn't run CGT on a single annual due date. The tax year splits into an initial period (1 January - 30 November) and a later period (1 December - 31 December), each with its own payment deadline: gains from the initial period are due by 15 December of the same year, and gains from the later period - just the month of December - are due by 31 January of the following year. A disposal made on 20 December 2025 is on a completely different payment clock than one made on 20 November 2025, even though both land on the same CG1 return. Missing the 15 December deadline for gains realised earlier in the year is a common, avoidable error for anyone who only thinks about CGT once at filing time.

The return itself - reporting all disposals for the year - is due with your annual Income Tax return, by the standard 31 October paper deadline (later if filing and paying through ROS).

Form CG1 or Form 11 - which one, and why it matters

If you're not otherwise required to file an Income Tax return, crypto disposals go on the standalone Form CG1. If you do have to file a return - PAYE with additional income, self-assessed, or otherwise - the same disposal information goes into the CGT panel of Form 11 instead, and you don't file a separate CG1 on top of it. Getting this wrong (filing CG1 when a Form 11 was actually required) doesn't change the tax owed, but it's the kind of mismatch that draws Revenue correspondence.

The part almost every crypto tax tool skips: section 581's four-week rule

Plain FIFO - "the oldest units acquired are the first ones treated as sold" - is the default identification method most crypto tax software uses everywhere, including Ireland. It's usually right, but Irish law has a specific override that plain FIFO ignores: section 581 TCA 1997, the same identification rule originally written for shares, extended by Revenue's own Tax and Duty Manual Part 19-04-03 to "shares or securities or any other assets dealt in without identifying the particular assets disposed of or acquired" - which covers fungible crypto holdings.

It has two parts, and they cut in opposite directions:

1. The four-week matching rule (section 581(1)/(2)). If you acquire units of an asset within the 4 weeks (28 days) immediately before a disposal, that acquisition is matched to the disposal ahead of any older FIFO holdings - effectively LIFO within that 28-day window, before falling back to ordinary FIFO for whatever's left. Concretely: you bought 1 BTC in January 2025 at EUR 30,000, bought another 1 BTC in late August 2025 at EUR 42,000, then sold 1 BTC in mid-September 2025 for EUR 44,000. Plain FIFO would match the sale against the January purchase, showing a EUR 14,000 gain. Section 581 requires matching against the August purchase instead (it falls within the 4 weeks before the sale), showing a EUR 2,000 gain - a EUR 12,000 difference in taxable gain from the same transaction data, purely from which lot gets matched.

2. The loss ring-fence (section 581(3)). If you sell at a loss and then buy back the same asset within the following 4 weeks, that loss is restricted: it can only be set against gains from eventually disposing of the reacquired units, not against your other gains for the year. If only part of the disposed quantity was reacquired, the restriction applies pro rata - the fraction of the loss corresponding to units not reacquired stays usable normally; the rest is locked until the repurchased units are sold. This is Ireland's version of a wash-sale rule, and it catches exactly the pattern that's extremely common in crypto: selling at a loss for tax purposes (or simply rebalancing) and buying back shortly after, especially around volatile trading in the same asset within the same day or week.

One honest caveat: section 581's own statutory text names only shares and securities. Its extension to "any other assets dealt in without identifying the particular assets" rests on section 580(4)/(6) plus Revenue's own published TDM 19-04-03 position, not express words in section 581 itself - and it hasn't been tested for crypto specifically in any published Revenue guidance or case law. It is Revenue's own stated position, and it is not taxpayer-favourable (it exists to close identification loopholes, not open them), so there's no practical upside to ignoring it and hoping it doesn't apply - but it's worth knowing this rests on an extension, not a crypto-specific statute.

Why this matters more for active traders than long-term holders

If you buy once and sell once, years apart, section 581 rarely changes anything - FIFO and the four-week rule agree once nothing was bought in the 4 weeks before the sale. The rule bites hardest for anyone with frequent activity: dollar-cost-averaging into the same asset and periodically taking profit, rebalancing a portfolio that touches the same coin repeatedly, or any trading pattern where buys and sells of the same asset cluster within a few weeks of each other. In accounts with heavy stablecoin or same-asset churn, the four-week matching rule can end up governing a large share of disposals rather than being an edge case - which is exactly why a report that silently applies plain FIFO everywhere can misstate the gain (or the available loss) on a meaningful number of transactions, not just one or two.

Income Tax vs CGT for staking, mining and derivatives - facts, not defaults

Revenue's crypto manual doesn't give a blanket answer for staking rewards, airdrops, mining proceeds, or derivatives/funding activity - the correct treatment (Income Tax at receipt vs. no charge until disposal, or Income Tax vs. CGT for derivatives) turns on the specific facts of how the income arose and how the activity is conducted. Rather than silently picking a default, this is one of the areas where a report should treat the classification as an open item that the taxpayer confirms explicitly, not a computation that happens automatically underneath them.

How CoinTaxReporting helps

CoinTaxReporting generates an Irish CGT working paper that applies section 581's four-week matching and loss ring-fence rule automatically - not just plain FIFO - splits gains into the correct initial/later payment periods with the 15 December and 31 January deadlines shown separately, and maps disposals to the exact CG1 line numbers (or the equivalent Form 11 CGT panel) so transferring the figures to your return is direct. Staking, mining and derivatives treatment are left as explicit choices you confirm, not silent assumptions. See the full country overview or start with a free trial report.

Conclusion

Irish crypto CGT is straightforward at the headline level - 33% on the gain, standard exemption and loss rules, two payment deadlines instead of one - but the identification mechanics underneath it are not. Section 581 TCA 1997's four-week rule can shift real money between "taxable now" and "taxable later" (or make a loss temporarily unusable) purely based on timing that has nothing to do with the economics of the trade, and it's the kind of rule a generic FIFO calculator has no reason to know about unless it was built for Ireland specifically. If your activity involves any repeated buying and selling of the same asset within a few weeks, don't assume plain FIFO gives you the right number - check whether the four-week rule changes the matching.

This article is not tax or legal advice. Section 581's extension from shares to crypto-assets rests on Revenue's own Tax and Duty Manual position rather than express statutory text naming crypto, and the Income Tax vs. CGT classification for staking, mining and derivatives has not been comprehensively addressed in published Revenue guidance. Confirm your position with an Irish tax professional, particularly if your activity is frequent, includes staking or derivatives, or approaches the trading/investment boundary.

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