Divly's Global Crypto Taxation Report 2026

Crypto taxes are no longer a niche issue. They are one of the largest blind spots in the digital asset economy.

Across the world, hundreds of millions of people have bought, sold, or held crypto. Yet our estimates suggest that just 1.76% of crypto owners declare their crypto for tax purposes. Even in the high scenario, the figure rises only to 3.00%. In other words, even the most generous reading of the data still suggests that over 97% of crypto owners appear not to declare.

To measure that gap, we combine official tax authority data, public reporting, and estimates of crypto ownership. We found usable official declaration figures from nine countries, five of them from the last year. Where no public declaration count exists from 2024 onwards, we estimate a 2025 low, medium, and high range using the relationship between crypto tax searches and declaration counts in countries where both are available.

This also matters because the reporting environment is changing. In the United States, Form 1099-DA is now bringing many 2025 digital asset sales into the 2026 filing season. In the EU and across jurisdictions implementing the OECD's Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF), 2026 transactions are already entering reporting pipelines that will begin reaching tax authorities in 2027.

This report therefore captures crypto tax compliance just before a new reporting era. If compliance still appears this low now, the question is not whether the tax gap will come under greater pressure. It is how quickly that change will be felt.

Our estimates suggest that just 1.76% of crypto owners declare their crypto for tax purposes.

Even under the most generous assumptions, this figure rises to at most 3.00%, meaning that over 97% of crypto owners still appear not to declare.

In absolute terms, this translates to millions of declarants versus hundreds of millions of crypto owners.

What stands out immediately is how uneven compliance is across countries.

Japan

Japan ranks highest in our dataset, and this appears closely linked to how practical and standardized its tax reporting system is.

On the government side, Japan has focused heavily on simplifying the reporting process:

• The official crypto tax calculator allows users to compute their taxes without needing full transaction-level tracking
• Exchanges are required to provide annual transaction reports (年間取引報告書) compatible with this system
• Taxpayers can use the standardized Crypto Asset Statement (暗号資産の計算書) to complete their filing

In addition, Japan uses the 総平均法 (gross average cost method), which avoids the need to calculate cost basis transaction-by-transaction. This significantly lowers the barrier to compliance.

On the industry side, there has also been coordination:

• Industry bodies like JCBA and JVCEA have pushed for clearer tax frameworks and standardized transaction history statements beyond the annual transaction reports.

Taken together, Japan shows what happens when both regulation and infrastructure are aligned around ease of reporting.

Norway

Norway ranks second and provides a different example of relatively high compliance, driven more by enforcement and visibility than simplification alone.

Several factors stand out:

• The tax authority has actively sent “nudge letters” to individuals it suspects of owning crypto
• Crypto ownership itself is taxable, not just trading activity, meaning more people are expected to report
• There is strong exchange concentration, with the majority of traders using the local platform Firi

Firi plays an important role in the ecosystem:

• It provides ready-made tax reports for users operating solely on the platform
• It actively directs users with more complex setups to specialized tax tools.

This combination of targeted enforcement, clear expectations, and integrated tooling appears to significantly increase reporting rates.

What do the official sources say?

Before we get into models and extrapolations, it helps to look at the hard numbers that are already out there. Even a quick scan of the available data shows the same pattern repeating across countries: the number of people declaring crypto is often surprisingly low.

We dive in deeper into each individual country above split by whether they provide a one time snapshot, or whether they have provided time-series data.

Countries with time-series data

A handful of countries provide more than a one-year snapshot. These are especially useful because they show whether crypto tax reporting is improving, plateauing, or falling back after an initial burst of attention.

Finland

Finland provides one of the clearest warnings that better visibility does not automatically translate into mass compliance. Public reporting indicates that there were 18,000 crypto taxpayers in 2025, against an estimated 450,000 crypto holders. The reporting does note that not all of the 450,000 owners are expected to be required to declare their taxes. The same reporting also notes that only around 10% of crypto transactions are declared.

Figures shared with us by the Finnish Tax Administration show 3,500 declarants in 2020, 16,200 in 2021, and 9,800 in 2022. On paper, 2025 is the highest point in the series. In practice, however, the level of reporting is only modestly above the earlier 2021 peak and still far below the likely number of people with taxable activity.

Poland

Poland shows growth in declarations, but also the difficulty of comparing official figures across years. According to Kryptoprawo, citing Ministry of Finance data, the number of declarants rose from 3,200 in 2019 to 10,600 in 2020.

More recent official guidance published by the Polish government on 21 January 2026 stated that 18,545 taxpayers declared cryptocurrency income in 2025 for the 2024 tax year.

However, this figure is not directly comparable to the earlier numbers. The older figures refer to przychody (revenue), while the newer figure refers to dochód (income), meaning revenue after deductible costs.

In practice, this means the 18,545 figure captures only taxpayers who ended up with a positive result after costs were deducted. It does not include people who reported crypto revenue but had no taxable income because their costs fully offset it, nor does it include taxpayers who reported only purchase costs to carry forward to future years. In Poland, reporting those purchase costs is still mandatory in Poland even if no revenue has been made.

Because the 18,545 figure covers only taxpayers with positive income, we did not use it in our table of declarants. Our estimate for Poland is therefore much higher, at 93,000 declarants, as it is intended to capture the broader group of taxpayers who reported crypto activity, including those with revenue but no profit and those who declared only costs.

Romania

Romania offers a rarer example of a declining series. Reporting collected by Economedia indicates that 3,198 people declared crypto-related income in 2022. By 2024, that number had fallen to 1,613 declarants.

This number is just slightly higher than the number of declarants in 2019, which was 1,319, but is significantly lower than 33,155 people who declared in 2019, the first year regulations were put in place.

Taken together, the Romanian data suggests an initial burst of reporting after the rules were introduced, followed by a sharp drop-off. That is important because it shows that simply creating a reporting framework does not guarantee that taxpayers will keep using it in large numbers.

Sweden

Through our relationship with Skatteverket we’ve retrieved the following figures regarding the number of declarants over the past years. Sweden provides a short but useful series: roughly 2,660 declarants in 2021, 8,218 in 2022, 6,088 in 2023. Skatteverket has also published that the number of declarants in 2024 was around 6,000 around 9,000 in 2025. The exact series moves around, but the broader picture is stable: declarations remain low relative to likely ownership.

In that same source Sweden’s Tax Agency's estimates that the number of crypto owners lies somewhere between 320,000 and 740,000. That wide range is revealing in itself. It shows how limited official visibility still is. Even using the lower end of that ownership range, the implied share of people declaring crypto remains low.

Norway

Norway has one of the strongest official upward trends in the dataset. According to Skatteetaten, reported declarants rose from 6,470 in 2020 to 14,825 in 2021, 44,560 in 2022, 50,837 in 2023, 55,880 in 2024, and 73,131 in 2025. For clarification, the year here refers to when the tax return was filed, not when the crypto income was earned. In other words, the 2025 figure relates to the 2024 income year.

This is one of the clearest examples of compliance moving in the right direction over time. Even so, the official count still needs to be judged against the number of crypto holders. What makes Norway particularly important is that the tax authority itself explicitly attributes part of the increase to targeted "nudge" letters sent to people it suspects of owning crypto. In other words, the reporting rate did not rise on its own. It rose after direct enforcement pressure.

United States

Recent official information comes from IRS Publication 1304, which shows 6.65 million digital-asset-related returns in 2022 and 2.79 million in 2023. Even if one takes those larger counts at face value, they still need to be compared against the scale of US crypto ownership. An archived Triple-A ownership estimate suggests the number of US crypto owners was approaching 50 million at the time. That still implies that only a minority of owners were showing up in the tax data.

The United States also matters because it is now entering a new reporting phase. According to the IRS's Form 1099-DA overview and broker reporting guidance, many 2025 digital asset sales are being reported during the 2026 filing season, with brokers required to report gross proceeds for transactions effected on or after January 1, 2025. At the same time, this is still an early-stage regime: for 2025, the filing requirements generally apply to U.S. brokers, while the IRS's 2025 Form 1099-DA instructions make clear that additional reporting requirements apply from 2026 onward.

One-time snapshots

Not every country gives us a usable series. In several cases, we only found a single public figure. These snapshots are still valuable because they show that the same pattern appears across very different tax systems and very different levels of crypto adoption.

South Africa

South Africa's one-year snapshot is stark. According to Business Day's reporting on statements from SARS, only 17,000 South Africans had declared crypto, out of an estimated 6 million crypto owners. Even allowing for uncertainty in the ownership denominator, that points to an extremely low reporting rate.

Brazil

According to CNN Brasil's reporting on Receita Federal, 237,369 people declared crypto in 2023, with more than R$1 billion in value of crypto declared.

Portugal

Portugal is often described as a crypto tax haven, but this became less accurate following the 2023 State Budget, which brought crypto more clearly into the tax framework.

From 2023 onwards:

• Short-term capital gains (assets held <365 days) are taxed at 28%
• Long-term gains (>365 days) remain tax-exempt

In other words, crypto transactions were not tax-free in 2023, even if part of the regime remained relatively favorable.

According to Expresso, citing the Ministry of Finance, only 558 individuals declared crypto-related gains in 2023. Of these, 507 declared long-term gains that were exempt from tax, while only 51 declared short-term gains that were taxable.

The same basic picture appears in Faccounting's summary of the Portuguese data, which emphasizes that the number of declarants remained exceptionally low even after the 2023 budget changes brought crypto more clearly into the tax framework. The Portuguese case is a useful reminder that favorable headlines about tax treatment do not necessarily translate into widespread reporting once formal rules are in place.

What the official record tells us

The official record is thin, inconsistent, and still remarkably incomplete. That in itself is one of the main findings.

Our estimates for 2025

The official figures are enough to show that crypto tax compliance is low. What they are not enough to do is describe the whole market. Only a limited number of countries publish usable declaration counts, and even among those that do, the figures are not always fully comparable across years.

That means that if we want a global picture, we have to estimate what is happening in countries where no official declaration count is publicly available.

Why we show a range

For some countries, we have official declaration numbers. For many others, we do not. In those cases, presenting one exact figure would imply a level of precision that the available data does not support.

The range should be read as a practical estimate of likely outcomes, not as a claim that every country's true compliance rate can be measured exactly from search data alone. At the same time, this is not guesswork. The range is anchored in real declaration counts from the countries where those counts are available.

How the estimates are built

To estimate reporting outside the countries with official counts for 2024 or 2025, we looked at search demand for crypto tax related topics and compared it with actual declaration numbers in the countries where both were available.

To do that, we analyzed more than 12 million crypto tax related searches using Ahrefs.

The logic is straightforward:

The low estimate uses the lowest declarant-per-search relationship found in our benchmark set. In the current dataset, that lower bound is represented by Romania.

The high estimate uses the highest declarant-per-search relationship found in the benchmark set. In the current dataset, that upper bound is represented by Norway.

The medium estimate uses the average relationship across the benchmark countries with recent official declaration data and matching search traffic.

We also checked the model against countries outside the benchmark set where we had useful historical declaration and search traffic data, most notably the United States. These checks still fell within the Romania-to-Norway range, which gives us more confidence that the range is wide enough to be realistic without becoming so wide that it stops being useful.

For the United States specifically, the medium and high estimates are the same. Based on earlier years where both search data and declaration counts were available, the US has historically sat near the upper end of that range, broadly similar to Norway. Rather than widening the estimate artificially where the historical pattern does not support it, we therefore keep the US at that upper-range level.

More broadly, the modeled figures should be understood differently from the official ones. Where official counts exist, we use the official number. Where they do not, we use a range built from observed benchmarks.

What the range shows

In our medium scenario, we estimate roughly 5.3 million crypto declarants across the countries in our dataset, compared with around 301 million crypto owners. That implies that only 1.76% of owners appear to declare their crypto for tax purposes.

In the low scenario, the number falls to roughly 892,000 declarants, or about 0.30% of owners.

In the high scenario, the estimate rises to around 9 million declarants, or about 3.00% of owners.

Even the most generous interpretation still leaves the same broad conclusion intact: the overwhelming majority of crypto owners do not appear to declare.

That is the value of the range. The exact number moves, but the overall picture does not.

What changed since our 2023 report

Our previous report concluded that roughly 0.54% of crypto owners were declaring. This year’s estimate is slightly higher, though still low.

Some of that change may reflect real-world developments. Tax authorities are more aware of crypto, reporting tools have improved, and public understanding of tax obligations appears to be somewhat higher than it was a few years ago.

But part of the difference is also methodological. This year we have more official anchor points, more recent data, and a better way of expressing uncertainty in countries where we do not have direct counts.

What DAC8, CARF and 1099-DA change

This report measures where crypto tax compliance appears to stand today, but it also lands at a moment when the reporting environment is changing quickly.

That shift is already visible in the United States. According to the IRS, Form 1099-DA is used by brokers to report digital asset proceeds to taxpayers and the IRS, and for 2025 the filing requirements generally apply to U.S. brokers. The IRS's 2025 Form 1099-DA instructions and final broker reporting guidance also show that this is the first phase of a broader rollout: brokers must report gross proceeds for transactions effected on or after January 1, 2025, while additional reporting requirements apply from 2026 onward.

In the EU, DAC8 is now live for the 2026 reporting year. According to the European Commission's DAC8 page, Reporting Crypto-Asset Service Providers must start collecting data on reportable crypto-asset transactions from January 1, 2026, and the first reporting year is 2026. That information is then reported to national tax authorities in 2027, with the first exchanges between EU tax authorities taking place by September 30, 2027.

DAC8 is not an isolated EU measure. The Commission states that its crypto reporting rules are based on the OECD's Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF). In its 2025 monitoring and implementation update, the OECD explains that CARF requires Crypto-Asset Service Providers to report information on the crypto-asset transactions they facilitate for reportable users. In practical terms, that covers the kind of activity that has historically been difficult for tax authorities to see clearly across borders. The same OECD update states that for jurisdictions committed to first exchanges in 2027, the effective date should generally be January 1, 2026, meaning due diligence and data collection should already be underway. The OECD has also said that first exchanges under CARF are expected to commence in 2027.

The practical implication is straightforward: the move from crypto taxes being primarily self-reported to being increasingly supported by broker and exchange reporting is no longer a future concept. In the United States, that shift has already begun for 2025 transactions. In the EU and across CARF jurisdictions, 2026 transactions are already becoming part of reporting pipelines that will reach tax authorities in 2027. For exchanges, that means the tax layer is becoming harder to treat as an afterthought. Collecting the right user information, maintaining usable transaction data, and helping customers navigate tax reporting will increasingly be part of the operating environment.

That matters directly for this report. These estimates describe compliance in and around the 2025 tax year, at the point where reporting is beginning to tighten but before broader cross-border visibility has fully arrived. If compliance still appears low at that point, then the gap we measure here is more than a snapshot of today's market. It is also a baseline for how large the compliance gap still was as this new reporting era began. As automatic reporting expands, the distance between crypto activity and tax visibility is likely to shrink quickly, and both exchanges and their users will need better reporting infrastructure as a result.

Any tax-related information provided by us is not tax advice, financial advice, accounting advice, or legal advice and cannot be used by you or any other party for the purpose of avoiding tax penalties. You should seek the advice of a tax professional regarding your particular circumstances. We make no claims, promises, or warranties about the accuracy of the information provided herein. Everything included herein is our opinion and not a statement of fact.