HMRC Finds 240 Crypto Millionaires in First Official Gains Data

HMRC’s First Crypto Gains Table Shows £1.38B Reported

The release accompanies a new Table 10 in HMRC’s annual Capital Gains Tax statistics, which the agency describes as Accredited Official Statistics. It is the first time the annual publication has broken out cryptoasset gains after Self Assessment added a dedicated cryptoasset section.

The measure is deliberately narrower than a count of crypto investors. It covers individuals who made a Capital Gains Tax-liable disposal in the 2024 to 2025 tax year. HMRC lists selling a cryptoasset, exchanging it for a different cryptoasset, paying for goods or services with it, and most gifts as examples of events that can create a disposal.

That means a person can appear in the data after an exchange even if no pounds were withdrawn to a bank. The figures also do not capture every tax treatment attached to digital assets. HMRC says income from employment, self-employment, mining, staking or lending is handled through existing Income Tax and National Insurance rules rather than an equivalent cryptoasset box.

The data provides a rare public denominator for a market usually discussed in wallet counts and trading volume. Still, it is not a measure of the number of wallets, the number of people who own crypto or the total tax due. The release gives reported gains and disposal proceeds, while each taxpayer’s final liability depends on their wider circumstances, reliefs, losses and applicable rates.

240 Crypto Millionaires Reported £717M in Gains

The concentration in the top group is the headline figure. HMRC said the 240 people reporting more than £1 million each generated £717 million in gains between them, or about 52% of the £1.38 billion aggregate, while the average gain across all 17,600 reporters was £78,000.

The agency said approximately 87% of people reporting cryptoasset gains were male and 13% were female. It did not publish names, individual asset holdings, exchange names, regional detail, a breakdown by Bitcoin or other tokens, or a list of the trades that produced the gains.

The absent detail matters when reading the figures against market headlines. A declared gain can result from a sale, a token-for-token exchange or a payment, and it may reflect activity over a tax year rather than a single bull-market move. HMRC also cautions that the statistics are rounded.

The data lands as the UK formalizes a wider perimeter around crypto businesses. The FCA’s 2027 crypto rulebook sets an authorisation timetable for exchanges, custodians and other firms, while HMRC’s data is about reporting and tax, not a judgment on whether a product or platform is authorised.

UK Crypto Reporting Rules Put 2027 on the Calendar

From January 2026, the UK began implementing the OECD’s Cryptoasset Reporting Framework, or CARF. HMRC says cryptoasset service providers will have to report customer information to tax authorities, with the agency due to receive that information from 2027.

HMRC says providers that fail to comply can face penalties of up to £300 per user. The framework is designed to give tax authorities standardized information for identifying potentially undeclared cryptoasset gains and income; it does not itself say every crypto transaction produces a tax bill.

For the 2025 to 2026 tax year, HMRC says people with cryptoasset income or gains above the tax-free allowance should declare and pay what they owe through Self Assessment by Jan. 31, 2027. Someone with an unpaid historical liability may use HMRC’s Crypto Disclosure Service to bring their position up to date, subject to the service’s terms and individual circumstances.

The statistics also frame the scale of HMRC’s earlier compliance work. The agency estimated its cryptoasset education and outreach activity directly generated an additional £168 million of Capital Gains Tax in 2024 to 2025. That is an HMRC estimate of extra tax generated by the work, not an estimate of tax avoided or unpaid across the entire market.

Crypto market sentiment was in Greed territory during the release window. Alternative.me’s Crypto Fear and Greed Index read 68 on Aug. 29, down from 73 a day earlier. The indicator does not measure UK tax compliance, but it offers a current market backdrop to a report drawn from a completed tax year.

The next hard dates are administrative rather than market-driven: the Jan. 31, 2027 Self Assessment deadline for the 2025 to 2026 year and HMRC’s planned receipt of CARF data in 2027. The first crypto-specific table supplies a benchmark, but it leaves unanswered how many investors made non-taxable trades, reported losses, or have records HMRC has yet to match.