French crypto disposal tax, the facts

This article describes rules of law. It is not tax advice, it takes no account of your personal situation, and it does not replace consulting a professional or reading the official texts. Thresholds, rates and reporting duties change with each finance act: check the version in force for the year concerned.

The taxable event: what triggers tax

The central point of the French regime, and the one that surprises most people, is this: swapping one digital asset for another digital asset does not trigger tax. Selling bitcoin for USDT, then USDT for ether, produces no taxable event.

What triggers tax is leaving the digital-asset sphere:

• disposal against legal tender — euro, dollar, real, naira;
• using digital assets to buy goods or services;
• an exchange with a cash component, for the cash part.

In other words, the conversion you carry out on a service like ours is the taxable event. It is the moment the unrealised gain accumulated since your purchases becomes taxable.

That rule has an important practical consequence: bookkeeping is not done trade by trade, it is done on money in and money out.

Calculating the gain

The regime for private individuals does not compute the gain disposal by disposal the way it does for shares. It applies a formula covering the whole digital-asset portfolio.

gain = disposal price
     - (total acquisition price x disposal price / total portfolio value)

Term by term.

• Disposal price: what you actually receive, net of the costs borne on the disposal. The net shown on your receipt, not the gross at mid-market.
• Total acquisition price: everything you paid in legal tender to acquire your digital assets, less the acquisition fractions already accounted for on previous disposals.
• Total portfolio value: the value of all your digital assets on the day of the disposal, across every venue — platforms, personal wallets, custody services.

That last term causes the most trouble. It requires knowing the total value of your digital holdings on the date of every disposal, including assets unrelated to the operation.

Direct consequence: the more scattered your portfolio, the heavier the bookkeeping. That is a practical argument for systematically exporting all your operations, whatever the platform.

The 305 euro threshold

An exemption applies when the sum of disposal prices for the year does not exceed 305 euros. The threshold applies to the total amount disposed of, not to the gain realised.

That means a 280 euro gain on a 300 euro disposal is not taxable, while a 5 euro gain on a 400 euro disposal is. The trigger is the sale amount, not the profit.

Note that being under the threshold does not remove reporting duties for accounts held abroad, which are independent.

The rate

Gains on disposals of digital assets realised occasionally by a private individual fall under the single flat-rate levy, often called the "flat tax", combining income tax and social levies.

Since the taxation of 2023 income, an option for the progressive income tax scale is available. It can be more favourable for a lightly taxed household and unfavourable beyond that. The option is global for the year: it is not chosen disposal by disposal.

We will not tell you which to pick. The calculation depends on all your income, not on your crypto operations alone.

Occasional or professional

The distinction is structural and does not rest on a numeric threshold.

Activity carried out occasionally falls under the capital gains regime described above. Activity carried out in conditions comparable to a professional's — frequency, use of professional tools and methods, volumes, sophistication — falls under non-commercial profits (BNC), with an entirely different tax and social treatment.

Since 2023, habitual buying and selling falls under BNC rather than BIC. Mining also falls under BNC.

There is no transaction count above which you become professional. The assessment is made case by case. If your activity is intense, that is exactly the kind of question that justifies consulting a professional rather than reading an article.

The forms

Three documents come round every year.

• Form 2086 details each taxable disposal of the year: date, disposal price, total acquisition price, total portfolio value, and the resulting gain or loss.
• Return 2042 C carries the overall result from form 2086.
• Form 3916-bis declares digital-asset accounts opened, held, used or closed abroad.

That last one is the most frequently forgotten, and it is penalised independently of any tax due: a fixed fine per undeclared account per year, increased when the account value exceeds a certain amount. An account on a foreign platform — even with a zero balance, even never used for a withdrawal — is in scope.

A self-hosted wallet whose keys you alone hold is not an account opened with a third party: the treatment differs. That is an important nuance and one more reason to have your situation reviewed.

Losses

A loss recognised on a disposal of digital assets offsets gains of the same nature realised in the same year. It cannot be carried forward to later years, unlike the regime for securities.

That has a calendar consequence: a loss realised in December and a gain realised the following January do not offset each other.

What we provide, and what we do not

What your account contains:

• the timestamp of every order;
• the quantity of the asset disposed of and the network used;
• the net amount received, in the payout currency;
• the full fee breakdown, line by line;
• an export usable by an accountant or filing software.

What we do not provide:

• your total acquisition price, which we do not know;
• your total portfolio value, of which we see only a fraction;
• a gain calculation, which needs both of the above;
• advice on the progressive-scale option, on your occasional or professional status, or on any optimisation strategy.

A service announcing "your tax" from the operations it alone can see would be giving you a wrong number.

The transparency calendar

The European framework for automatic exchange of information is being extended to digital assets. Providers will be required to report their customers' operations to their own administration, with onward transmission between national administrations.

The practical effect: do not rely on opacity as a tax management method. Any divergence between what you declare and what the administration receives will become mechanically visible.

Three practical consequences

Export as you go, not in April. Platforms shut down, interfaces change, exports vanish. The acquisition side of the calculation is the part nobody else holds, and it is the part that becomes impossible to reconstruct once an account is closed.

Keep the net, not the gross. The disposal price is what actually reached your account, after the fees borne on the disposal. Using the mid-market gross inflates the declared gain and makes you pay tax on money you never received.

Do not treat a crypto-to-crypto swap as invisible. It is not a taxable event under the French regime, but it still changes your acquisition base and therefore every later calculation. Not taxable is not the same as not worth recording.

Where to check

The authoritative sources are the general tax code, the administrative doctrine published in the official bulletin of public finances, and the annual form instructions. A blog article — this one included — is context, not a source.

For the structure of the tax guide by country, see the tax guide. For the tax note attached to France in our data, see the France country page. To retrieve your operations, the help centre explains where the export lives.