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HMRC reports 240 crypto millionaires in new tax data
Howard Lake | 2 September 2026 | News
HM Revenue and Customs has published figures showing that 240 people reported more than £1 million in capital gains from cryptoassets in the 2024 to 2025 tax year, between them accounting for £717 million of gains.
The data appears in HMRC’s annual Capital Gains Tax statistics, published on 27 August. It is the first time HMRC has published this particular breakdown, made possible by a dedicated cryptoasset section added to the Self Assessment return.
Not so hidden
In 2024 to 2025, 17,600 individuals made disposals of cryptoassets liable to Capital Gains Tax. Between them they reported disposal proceeds of £13.8 billion and gains of £1.38 billion, an average of £78,000 per individual. Around 87% of those reporting gains were male and around 13% female.
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These are only the gains that were declared. HMRC begins receiving data from cryptoasset service providers in 2027 under the Cryptoasset Reporting Framework, an OECD standard the UK started implementing in January 2026, so the picture may look different in a year or two.
The detail that matters to fundraisers
The fundraising interest is buried in HMRC’s notes to editors. Setting out what counts as a disposal, HMRC lists selling cryptoassets, exchanging them for another cryptoasset, using them to pay for goods or services, and giving them away to another person, “other than as a gift to a spouse, civil partner or charity”.
In other words, a donor sitting on a substantial unrealised crypto gain can give the asset itself to a charity without that gift triggering the Capital Gains Tax charge that selling it would. For a donor holding an asset that has risen sharply in value, that is a meaningful difference, and it is the same logic that has long made gifts of shares and property attractive to major donors.
This is not tax advice, and any charity or donor considering it should take proper professional guidance and check the current position on GOV.UK. The point is simply that there is now a published, official figure for how many UK individuals hold crypto wealth at this scale, and 240 people with more than £1 million in gains in a single year is a prospect pool worth understanding.
Cryptocurrency donations to date
Charities have been accepting cryptocurrency for some years. UNICEF launched a crypto fund in 2019, UNICEF Australia used cryptocurrency mining for fundraising in 2018, and JustGiving extended its acceptance to more than 60 currencies in 2024. What has been missing is any reliable sense of the size of the UK donor base. These figures start to fill that gap.
The full statistics are available in HMRC’s Capital Gains Tax statistics on GOV.UK.
- JustGiving announces acceptance of more than 60 forms of cryptocurrency (19 November 2024)
- Over £100 million donated through crypto fundraising platform to date (29 March 2023)
- Children’s Heart Unit Fund receives over £100K in cryptocurrency donations in a year (2 July 2021)
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.