Best Crypto Tax Programs UK 2026

For a UK investor, the crypto tax software worth paying for is the one that applies HMRC’s same-day, 30-day and Section 104 matching rules to every transaction, across every exchange and wallet you’ve used. If you’ve only sold once or twice this year you probably don’t need software at all, and a free calculator or a spreadsheet will do. AI chatbots are handy for understanding the rules, but they aren’t a safe way to produce the figures for your return.

What is the best crypto tax software for you?

It depends on how many disposals you made this tax year, and where you made them. If you already know your gain, a free calculator will estimate the tax in a minute. Once you’re swapping between tokens, using more than one platform or earning staking rewards, a spreadsheet gets painful quickly, because HMRC treats every swap between tokens as a disposal (see what counts).

How to choose crypto tax software in the UK

These are the ten things we’d check before paying for any crypto tax software, our own included. Most of them come down to two questions: does it follow HMRC’s rules, and can it show you how it got each number?

1. Make sure it matches disposals the way HMRC does. A sale is matched first with tokens of the same type bought on the same day, then with any bought in the following 30 days, and only after that with your Section 104 pool (HMRC’s Cryptoassets Manual). In the settings, the UK should be your tax country and the cost method shouldn’t be FIFO, which many other countries use.
2. Check that it connects to every exchange and wallet you’ve used, either automatically or through a file upload. If one platform is missing, the cost of everything you sell afterwards will be wrong.
3. Transfers between your own wallets aren’t disposals, so the software has to pair each withdrawal with its deposit. If it can’t, it will count a sale that never happened. Our guide to wallet transfers goes through the rules.
4. Find out where its prices come from. When you swap one token for another there’s no pound price, so HMRC expects an appropriate exchange rate, applied the same way every time, and a note of the method you used (CRYPTO23000).
5. It should keep income and gains apart. Staking, mining and airdrop rewards can count as income on your main tax return, while disposals go on the SA108 (how the two taxes differ).
6. It should produce the five figures the SA108 cryptoassets section asks for (boxes 13.1 to 13.5), from the number of disposals to your total losses. Our SA108 guide shows where each one goes.
7. You should be able to see the calculation behind every disposal. HMRC wants you to keep the type of token, the date, how many you sold and still hold, the value in pounds and the pooled cost before and after each sale (GOV.UK). If the software exports that, you or your accountant can check it line by line.
8. If you have earlier years to put right, it needs to work out each year separately. HMRC can look back as far as 20 years in the worst cases (what happens if you don’t declare).

Best free crypto tax software in the UK

Free is realistic for a small year. If your total gains are within the £3,000 allowance and everything you sold in the year came to less than £50,000, you may have nothing to report at all (our SA108 guide explains the thresholds). If you already know your gains, or you made only a few disposals, you can get by without paying anything. Beyond that, free plans tend to let you import and check your data and then charge for the tax report itself, so look at the transaction limit and the tax years covered before you rely on one.

Free crypto tax calculators

A calculator starts from a gain you already know. You enter it along with your income, and it applies the £3,000 allowance and the 18% or 24% rate. It can’t work out the gain itself from a year of trades, because that needs the matching rules. Our UK crypto tax calculator is free, and so isour capital gains tax calculator if you’ve also sold shares or property.

Doing it in a spreadsheet

For a handful of sales from one exchange, a spreadsheet is fine. Give each transaction its own row with the details HMRC asks you to keep, and add a running total for your Section 104 pool. HMRC’s own worked examples show how the same-day and 30-day rules change the numbers.

It gets hard once you swap tokens regularly. Every swap means two entries, because you dispose of one token and acquire another, and both need a sterling value on the day. Get one match wrong and every line below it is off.

Here’s how much one trade can change. Say you bought 4 ETH in 2020 for £1,200 in total. On 10 March 2027 you sell 2 ETH for £5,000, and on 25 March you buy 2 ETH back for £4,600. A spreadsheet that takes the cost from your pool average gives one answer, and HMRC’s 30-day rule, which matches the sale with the purchase 15 days later, gives another.

Over the years the totals even out, but the gain for 2026/27 is wrong, and that’s the year you’re filing. Make the same mistake with a loss and you’d claim a loss HMRC won’t allow.

Can ChatGPT or AI do your crypto tax?

ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and other chatbots are good at explaining HMRC’s rules in plain English. We wouldn’t trust one with the figures on a tax return, though.

A chatbot only knows what you paste into it. Upload your exchange history but not your wallet, and a withdrawal to your own wallet looks exactly like a sale.

Then there are prices. Every swap needs a value in pounds at the moment it happened, and HMRC expects the same method throughout, with a note of it (CRYPTO23000). A chatbot doesn’t keep a consistent, documented source for each of those rates.

AI answers can also mix in rules from other countries. In September 2026 we looked at the AI Overviews Google showed for five common UK crypto tax questions. Two of them quoted pages written for other countries, and the one for “is sending crypto to another wallet taxable” didn’t cite a single UK source.

And if HMRC ever asks how you got a figure, you need an answer. Matching hundreds of disposals is a long chain of arithmetic, and a chatbot can come back with a different result each time you ask. HMRC expects you to keep records good enough to make a correct and complete return (CH81120).

Where a chatbot does help is in explaining a rule you’re stuck on, or in sanity-checking one calculation you’ve already done.

A full transaction history shows your balances and your wallet addresses, so check the settings before you paste it anywhere. ChatGPT, for example, can use your conversations to train OpenAI’s models unless you turn off “Improve the model for everyone” under Data controls (OpenAI).

Do you need an accountant as well as crypto tax software?

For most people, no. If your year is made up of sales, swaps, some staking and transfers between your own wallets, software handles it and you can file the figures yourself. An accountant earns their fee when the tax treatment itself is open to question, and they’ll get through your case faster if you hand them the software’s report rather than a folder of CSV files.

That usually means one of these situations:

1. You trade so often that HMRC might see it as a trade, with profits taxed as income. HMRC says this only happens in exceptional circumstances, but it’s a question of fact (CRYPTO20250).
2. You lend, borrow or provide liquidity in DeFi, where whether a deposit counts as a disposal depends on the terms.
3. You’ve lived abroad, or you’re planning to. If you come back within five years, gains on crypto you owned before you left can be taxed in the year you return (more on moving abroad).
4. You need to tell HMRC about gains from earlier years, and the penalty depends on how and when you come forward.

HMRC’s own guidance says that anyone dealing with a transaction they’re not familiar with should find out the correct treatment or get advice (CH81120).

How Waltio calculates your UK crypto tax

Declaring your crypto to HMRC can be tedious and complex, especially if you have dozens or hundreds of transactions across a tax year. That’s why tracking all your movements through a dedicated crypto tax platform is essential.

Waltio is used by more than 150,000 people. It connects to over 700 exchanges, wallets and blockchains with read-only access, and your data is never shared or sold. For UK users it applies the same-day, 30-day and Section 104 rules and pairs up transfers between your own wallets, and every transaction is valued in pounds using the same price method throughout.

The UK report gives you the figures for the SA108 cryptoassets section and for your crypto income, with the detail behind each disposal. Connecting your accounts and tracking your portfolio is free, with no card needed, and you’ll see your figures before you choose a plan.