Crypto Tax Calculator

Crypto Tax Calculator

Track and calculate your cryptocurrency investments with this crypto tax calculator. Analyze returns, plan trades, and understand your portfolio performance.

What You Can Calculate

• Profit/Loss: See gains or losses from your trades
• ROI: Calculate return on investment percentage
• Break-even Price: Know when you'll recover your investment
• Average Cost: Calculate your dollar-cost average

Using This Calculator

1. Enter your purchase price and quantity 2. Input the current or target price 3. Add any fees or transaction costs 4. Review your profit/loss analysis

The Risk Specific to This Asset

Cryptocurrency investments involve significant volatility, evolving regulation, and custody risk. Understand what you are buying before sizing a position.

Risks Common to Every Crypto Asset

• Custody: losing a private key loses the asset permanently, with no recovery process
• Regulation: treatment varies by jurisdiction and changes with little notice
• Counterparty: an exchange balance is a claim on the exchange, not an asset you hold
• Volatility: 50%+ drawdowns are ordinary rather than exceptional in this asset class

Crypto Is Property, Not Currency

The IRS treats crypto as property, which makes every disposal a taxable event — not just cashing out.

Action	Taxable?
Buying with fiat	No
Holding	No
Selling for fiat	Yes
Swapping one token for another	Yes
Spending it on goods	Yes
Transferring between your own wallets	No
Receiving as payment or mining reward	Yes, as ordinary income
Staking rewards	Yes, as income when you gain control

The swap rule catches people out constantly: trading ETH for SOL realises the gain on the ETH, in dollars, on that day — even though no dollars moved.

Cost basis must be tracked per lot and per acquisition. Since 2025, brokers report on Form 1099-DA and basis must be tracked per wallet rather than universally, which invalidates some older accounting approaches.

Holding over a year gets long-term rates. And note that the wash sale rule has historically not applied to crypto, though proposals to extend it recur — check the current position before relying on it.

Costs That Turn a Gain Into a Loss

Cost	Typical	When it applies
Exchange fee	0.1–1.5%	Both on buy and on sell
Spread	0.05–1%	The gap between quote and fill
Network fee	$0.01–$50	Per on-chain transaction
Withdrawal fee	Fixed per asset	Moving off the exchange
Conversion	0.5–2%	Fiat in and out

A 1% fee on each side of a trade is 2% of the position, which on a 10% gain is a fifth of the profit. Calculations that compare only entry and exit price overstate returns systematically, and the overstatement is worst on frequent small trades.

Volatility Is Not Symmetric

Drawdown	Gain needed to recover
−10%	+11%
−25%	+33%
−50%	+100%
−75%	+300%
−90%	+900%

Recovering from a loss takes a larger percentage than the loss itself, because the gain applies to a smaller base. This is why position sizing matters more than entry timing: a position that can fall 90% needs to multiply tenfold just to break even.

Custody

"Not your keys, not your coins" is not a slogan — Mt. Gox, QuadrigaCX, Celsius and FTX all lost customer assets held on their platforms.

Where	Control	Risk
Exchange	Theirs	Insolvency, freeze, hack
Hot wallet	Yours	Malware, phishing
Hardware wallet	Yours	Physical loss, seed exposure
Multisig	Shared	Complexity

A seed phrase is the asset. Anyone who reads it owns the funds, and losing it is unrecoverable — there is no reset.

Tax Follows Every Disposal

In the US the IRS treats crypto as property, so selling, swapping one token for another and spending it are all taxable events, whether or not dollars moved. Cost basis must be tracked per lot, per wallet. Without records the default assumption is a zero basis, which makes the entire proceeds taxable.